Australian Political Studies Association 2011 Conference · Australian Political Studies Association 2011 Conference 26–28 September 2011 Old Parliament House l Canberra CONFERENCE

Australian Political Studies Association

2011 Conference

26–28 September 2011 Old Parliament House l Canberra

CONFERENCE PROGRAM & ABSTRACTS

Conference hosted by

The School of Politics & International Relations Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Social Sciences

The Australian National University

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iv

Convenors of the streams and panels 1

Conference Overview 2

Plenary Sessions 5

Launches and Other Events 8

Social Events 8

Detailed Program 9

Abstracts 23

Map of Old Parliament House Session Rooms 123

iv Acknowledgements

Sponsors

Taylor and Francis

Museum of Australian Democracy

Staff and Students of the School of Politics and International Relations, ANU who have contributed to APSA 2011:

Christian Barry Juliet Pietsch

April Biccum John Ravenhill

Sean Burges Nikola Regent

Katrina Lee‐Koo Marian Sawer

Maria Maley Hayley Stevenson

Victoria Mason John Wanna

Adam Masters Caroline Wood

Ian McAllister Carrie Wright

We would also like to thank the team at the College Outreach and Administrative Support Team in the College of Law, The Australian National University and Ms Mary Hapel for their support.

APSA Conference 2011 Convenors of the Streams 1

Australian politics and governance Maria Maley

John Wanna

Comparative politics and development Sean Burges Ian McAlister

Environmental politics Hayley Stevenson

Ethnicity, ‘race’, religion and identity April Biccum Victoria Mason

Gender politics and sexuality Katrina Lee‐Koo Marian Sawer

International relations and international political economy John Ravenhill Hayley Stevenson

Media, culture and communication April Biccum Juliet Pietsch

Migration and Refugees Victoria Mason Juliet Pietsch

Political and Social Theory Christian Barry Nikola Regent

2 Conference Overview APSA Conference 2011

Monday 26 September 2011

Time Event Venue

8.00am Registration Outside the Members’ Dining Room

9.00—9.45am Welcome to Country Mrs Ruth Bell, Senior Ngunnawal Elder

Opening Address Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AO QC, Chancellor, The Australian National University

The Members’ Dining Room

9.45—11.00am Session 1 Panels Various

11—11.30am Morning Tea Outside the Members’ Dining Room

11.30am—1.00pm Session 2 Panels including the launch of the Politics and Law Network Australia

Various

1.00—2.30pm Lunch Outside the Members’ Dining Room

2.30—4.00pm Session 3 Panels Various

4.00—4.30pm Afternoon tea Outside the Members’ Dining Room

4.30—5.30 pm ARC Speakers Professor Andrew Wells & Professor Marian Simms


5.30—6.30pm Welcome Reception Kings Hall

APSA Conference 2011 Conference Overview 3

Tuesday 27 September 2011

Time Event Venue


9.00—10.00am Presidential Address Professor Katharine Gelber

The Member’s Dining Room


11.00—11.30am Morning Tea Outside the Members’ Dining Room

11.30—12.30pm Keynote speaker Professor Donald Emmerson


12.30—2.00pm Lunch

Women’s Caucus

Launch of the APSA Working Group on Environmental Politics

Outside the Members’ Dining Room

Private Dining Room 1

Secretariat


3.30—4.00pm Afternoon Tea Outside the Members’ Dining Room


5.45—6.45pm Annual General Meeting for APSA


7.15pm Conference Dinner Gandel Hall, National Gallery of Australia

4 Conference Overview APSA Conference 2011

Wednesday 28 September 2011

Time Event Venue



10.30—11.00am Morning Tea Outside the Members’ Dining Room

11.00am—12.30pm Session 8 Panels Various

12.30—2.00pm Head of Departments’ Lunch Private Dining Room 1

APSA Conference 2011 Plenary Sessions 5

Conference Opening by Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AO QC, Chancellor,The Australian National University

Monday, 9am, Members Dining Room

Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AO QC has been Chancellor of The Australian National University since January 2010, a Professorial Fellow at The University of Melbourne since July 2009, and is President Emeritus of the Brussels‐based International Crisis Group, which he led from 2000 to 2009. He was Australia’s Foreign Minister 1988–96, held three other Cabinet posts 1983–88, and was Leader of the Government in the Senate. He was Co‐Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000–01) and International Commission on Nuclear Non‐Proliferation and Disarmament (2008–10) and a member of numerous other high‐level international panels. He has written or edited nine books—most recently The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All (Brookings Institution, 2008) and published over 100 journal articles and chapters on foreign relations, human rights and legal and constitutional reform. He received the 2010 Roosevelt Institute Award for Freedom from Fear, for his pioneering work on the Responsibility to Protect concept, and his contributions to conflict prevention and resolution, arms control and disarmament.

Professor Andrew Wells, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Australian Research Council & Professor Marian Simms, Executive Director for Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences of the Australian Research Council

Monday, 4.30pm Members Dining Room

Trends in Political Science Funding from the Australian Research Council

Professor Andrew Wells joined the ARC in February 2009 in the position of Executive Director, Humanities and Creative Arts. Before joining the ARC, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong for five years, commencing in September 2003.

Professor Wells has a strong understanding of the ARC and the humanities and arts sector. He has held four ARC grants and has been a highly active HDR supervisor—with around 25 completions to his credit. Professor Wells has previously been an active member of the Executive of the Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. In addition, he has a longstanding interest in interdisciplinary studies, substantial and longstanding management experience, and a great capacity for strategic thinking.

Professor Wells is a graduate of Monash University (BA Hons, MA) and The Australian National University (PhD). He has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in politics, history, economic history, Asian studies and Australian studies at Monash University, Melbourne University, The Australian National University and the University of Wollongong.

Professor Wells is published widely on Australian economics, and labour and intellectual history. His current research interests concern comparative studies of Australian and South East Asian labour history, most recently focusing on imperial hegemony and colonial labour—a major, multi‐authored study on the commodification of colonial labour is close to completion.

Professor Marian Simms joined the ARC in August 2011 as Executive Director for Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences.

6 Plenary Sessions APSA Conference 2011

Prior to this, Professor Simms held the position of Head of the School of History, Heritage and Society at Deakin University from 2009–2011 and Chair in Australian Studies. Other appointments include Chair in Political Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, 2002–2009 (Head 2002–2007); and Reader in Political Science ANU, 1994–2002. She is an honours graduate of the ANU in History and Political Science, with a PhD in Politics from La Trobe University.

Professor Simms has an international reputation in the fields of gender studies and political science derived from a strong publication record and a history of grants and awards. She has published 5 authored and co‐authored books, 9 edited and co‐edited books, and over 80 articles and chapters. She has received research grants from the ARC, the NSW Sesquicentenary Committee, the National Committee for the Centenary of Federation and the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. She was also awarded a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Southern California and holds a Centenary of Federation medal for her research on the 1901 Election.

She has been active in the administration and evaluation of research. From 2005–2009 she served as the inaugural convenor of the Humanities Research Cluster on Political Communication, Policy and Participation at the University of Otago. The Cluster sponsored research on political communication in British, Australian and New Zealand elections, research workshops for postgraduates, public lectures and a number of high profile visitors. From 2003–2006 she was the Chair of the International Political Science Association’s Research Committee on Gender, Globalization and Democratization. She was invited by the Swedish Research Council to chair the process for selecting and evaluating new centres of research excellence in 2006 and 2008. She served two terms as a member of the Social Science panel of the Performance Based Research Funding Evaluation in New Zealand (equivalent of Australia’s ERA).

Professor Simms is past President of the Australian Political Studies Association, and co‐editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science.

Presidential Address by Professor Katharine Gelber, President of APSA

Tuesday, 9am, Members Dining Room

Generational Challenges in Australian Political Science

Katharine Gelber is the President of the Australian Political Studies Association (Sep 2010–Sep 2011). She is an Associate Professor in the School of Political Science & International Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research examines human rights policy, with a particular emphasis on freedom of speech and the regulation of hate speech. In 2011 she was the Australian Expert Witness at a United Nations’ regional meeting discussing States’ compliance with the free speech and racial hatred provisions of international law. In 2009 she presented the prestigious Mitchell Oration in Adelaide on the topic of 'freedom of speech and its limits'. She has recently published Speech Matters: How to Get Free Speech Right (University of Queensland Press, 2011) and has published articles in journals including Political Studies, Contemporary Political Theory, the Melbourne University Law Review, Review of International Studies, the Australian Journal of Human Rights and the Australian Journal of Political Science.

APSA Conference 2011 Plenary Sessions 7

Professor Donald Emmerson, Director of the Southeast Asia Forum (SEAF)

Tuesday, 11.30am, Members Dining Room

Crisis, Uncertainty, and Democracy: Black Swans, Fat Tails, and the Futures of Political Science

Donald Emmerson is Director of the Southeast Asia Forum (SEAF) at Shorenstein APARC, a senior fellow at FSI, and an affiliated scholar with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Recent publications by Emmerson include an edited book, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (November 2008), and these chapters and articles: ‘Critical Terms: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia,’ in Hard Choices (2008); ‘ASEAN's “Black Swans,”’ Journal of Democracy (July 2008); ‘Southeast Asia in Political Science: Terms of Enlistment,’ in Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (2008); ‘Challenging ASEAN: A “Topological” View,’ Contemporary Southeast Asia (December 2007); ‘From State to Society? Democracy and Regionalism in Southeast Asia,’ in The Inclusive Regionalist (2007); ‘One Nation under God? History, Faith, and Identity in Indonesia,’ in Religion and Religiosity in the Philippines and Indonesia: Essays on State, Society, and Public Creeds (2006); and ‘Shocks of Recognition: Leifer, Realism, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia,’ in Order and Security in Southeast Asia: Essays in Memory of Michael Leifer (2006); and ‘Garuda and Eagle: Do Birds of A (Democratic) Feather Fly Together?’ The Indonesian Quarterly (2006). Earlier publications, authored or edited, span some dozen monographs and more than a hundred articles and chapters.

Emmerson serves on the editorial boards of the Contemporary Southeast Asia, Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. He is a member of the Board of Advisors, National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, WA; the Research Council, International Forum for Democratic Studies, Washington, DC; the Strategic Dialogue on New Power Dynamics in Southeast Asia, Stanley Foundation, Muscatine, IA; the US Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia‐Pacific, Pacific Forum/CSIS, Honolulu, HI; and the Working Group on Democratization, Global Expertise Reserve Program, US State Department, Washington, DC.

8 Launches & Social Events APSA Conference 2011

Politics and Law Network Australia Launch

Monday, 11.30am, Members Dining Room 2

Professor Helen Irving (Sydney): ‘Citizenship: Irreducibly political, irreversibly legal, historically gendered’

Professor Katharine Gelber (Uni of Queensland): ‘Free Speech and the National Flag’

Professor John Uhr (ANU): ‘The Law and Politics of Parliament’

Professor AJ Brown (Griffith): ‘Where Public Policy Meets Law (Or Does It?)’

This panel will launch the 'Politics and Law Network' in Australia. The PLN will be a loose network of like‐minded and interested academics and practitioners who are interested in strengthening the links and synergies between political scientists and legal scholars in Australia. In Australia the links between these two disciplinary areas have in the past been relatively weak and haphazard. Yet we are sensing a renewed interest in the interactions between these two disciplines, the possibilities of cooperative work, and the opportunities for collaboration and increased understanding. By creating the PLN, we are hoping to support and enhance that interest. We are hoping that the PLN might also become a formal research stream within APSA.

Panel on Academic Publishing Monday, 2.30pm, Members Dining Room 3

Professor Geoffrey Stokes, editor, Australian Journal of Political Science &

Professor Andrew O'Neil, editor, The Australian Journal of International Affairs

Environmental Politics and Policy Standing Research Group Launch Tuesday, 12.30pm, Secretariat Room

The APSA Environmental Politics and Policy Standing Research Group (EPPSRG) is APSA's first research group and was formed to coordinate the research and activities of environmental politics scholars in Australia and the region and to develop linkages with like‐minded international scholars and groups. It is the successor to the Ecopolitics Association of Australasia, which was founded to manage the Ecopolitics Conference Series that began in 1986 and comprised sixteen conferences hosted by universities across Australia and New Zealand.

Anyone with an interest in the field is welcome to attend the launch and encouraged to join the group.

Women’s Caucus Tuesday, 12.30pm, Private Dining Room 1

Social Events

Welcome Reception Monday 5.30pm, Kings Hall, Old Parliament House

Conference Dinner Tuesday, 7.30pm, Gandel Hall, National Gallery of Australia

Monday 26 September 2011

9

8.00am Registration opens

9.00 – 9.45am Welcome to Country by Mrs Ruth Bell, Senior Ngunnawal Elder Opening by Professor The Hon Gareth Evans AO QC — Members Dining Room

Secretariat Private Dining Room 1 House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 House of Reps 4 9.45 – 11am SESSION 1 Short Session

COMPARATIVE POLITICS & DEVELOPMENT

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS & GOVERNANCE

COMPARATIVE POLITICS

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS & INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY


MEDIA, CULTURE & COMMUNICATION

Comparative Politics 1 Leadership

Chair: John Warhurst

Comparative Politics 2 International Relations 1

Chair: Michael O’Keefe

Public Policy 1

Chair: John Wanna

Australian Media & Politics

Sumitra Kumar Jain Emerging Federal Political Culture in India: A survey of public perception

Kristian Hoelscher Hearts & Mines: A district level empirical analysis of the Maoist conflict in India

James Walter Studying Prime Ministerial Leadership: Towards a new synthesis

Maria Maley Investigating Ministerial Careers

Ashley McAllister Do Welfare-to-Work Policies Work for People with a Mental Illness

Diane Stone Private Philanthropy & the Transnational Policies of the Open Society Foundations

John Langmore Distinctive Features of Norwegian Foreign Policy: Possible lessons for Australia

Melissa Conley Tyler Australia's Role in the G20

Peter Carroll Australia & the Bretton Woods Institutions

Paul Fawcett The Core Executive in New South Wales (1995–2011)

Bligh Grant Regrets? He’s had a Few: Implications of Gerry Stoker’s (2011) revisionism for Australian local government reform

Richard Stanton Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage: Irony, melodrama & adversarial political discourse in the NSW state election campaign

Judith Betts The Changing Australian Politics of WMD over the Course of the Iraq War: Political agendas & press coverage

House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2

MIGRATION & REFUGEES

POLITICAL & SOCIAL THEORY

Migration & Refugees 1 Chair: Alex Reilly

Global Democracy

Chair: David Wiens

Gwenda Tavan No Going Back? Australian multiculturalism as a path dependent process

Kerry Ryan The Australian Citizenship Test: The ins & outs & who belongs?

Terry MacDonald On Legitimacy: The real 'first virtue' of global political institutions

Adrian Little Kate MacDonald The Social Foundations of Global Democracy: Rethinking analogies with the nation-state

Monday cont.

10

11.00 – 11.30am Morning Tea

MDR 1 Secretariat House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 MDR 2 11.30am – 1.00pm SESSION 2 GENDER POLITICS &

SEXUALITY COMPARATIVE POLITICS





Gendered Identities in Politics & Political Discourse

Chair: Katrina Lee Koo

Comparative Politics 3 Comparative Politics 4 International Relations 2

Chair: Melissa Conley-Tyler

International Relations 3

Chair: Peter Carroll

Politics and Law Network Australia Launch

Chair: John Uhr

Shakira Hussein From Rescue Missions to Discipline: Western political discourse on Muslim women during the post 9/11 decade

Diane Zetlin The Languages of Culture & Human Rights

Sheila Jeffreys Gender Eugenics: The transgendering of children

Jaime Baeza Freer, Miguel Angel Lopez Varas, Ricardo Gamboa Valenzuela From Polarisation to the Centre of the Political Spectrum: Party manifestos in Chile before & after authoritarianism

Michael Miller Democracy by Example? Economic growth, policy diffusion & regime change

Andrew Scott The Fragmentation of Political Parties on the Left & the Formation of New Alignments: Comparing Australia with the 'red-green' coalitions in northern Europe

Daniela Di Piramo I Remember You Well: The politics of symbolic recognition in Latin America

Peter Run From Crisis to Democracy? A systemic assessment of South Sudan’s founding constitution

Mark Chou Soft Authoritarianism Meets Inverted Totalitarianism

David Mickler New Engagement’ or ‘New Scramble’? Identifying Australia’s enhanced relationship with Africa

Cain Roberts Domesticated Foreign Policy? Prime ministers, domestic actors & a public policy approach to foreign policy analysis

Michael O'Keefe Australian Sanctions Against Fiji: Reappraising the calculus of success

Will Lee Evaluating the Prospects of a Democratic Security Community Between Australia & Indonesia

Annmarie Elijah Trans-Tasman Integration in Comparative Perspective

Greg Mahony Christopher Sadleir Integration within CER: Regulating FDI, crises & the challenge of cultural norms

Kate McMillan Free Movement of Persons & Regional Integration: The case of the trans Tasman travel arrangement

Craig Applegate Reasonable Insurance in Trade & Investment: Australia & its preferential trade agreements

John Uhr The Law & Politics of Parliament

AJ Brown Where Public Policy Meets Law (or does it?)

Helen Irving Citizenship: Irreducibly political, irreversibly legal, historically gendered

Katharine Gelber Free Speech & the National Flag

Session 2 continued overleaf

Monday cont.

11

House of Reps 4 House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2


ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS


11.30am – 1.00pm

SESSION 2 continued

General 1

Chair: Keith Dowding

Environmental Politics 1

Chair: John Dryzek

Virtue & Corruption in Political Thought

Chair: Christian Barry

Daniel Baldino Martin Drum Stop and Search without Reasonable Suspicion? The call for increased police powers in Western Australia

Helen Pringle Blaspheming in the Suburbs: The offence of blasphemy in a free speech regime

Merrindahl Andrew Meagre Harvest or Just Poorly Documented? Tracking women's movement legacies through government records

David Schlosberg Rethinking Ecological Justice: Capabilities & critics

Andy Scerri After Dualism?

Fabian Schuppert Resource Rights: What & whose are they?

Gavin Spackman Deep Green: An ecological critique of the industrial paradigm

Lisa Hill Adam Bugeja Changing Conceptions of Political Corruption in the Eighteenth Century

Nikola Regent Virtue in Classical & Contemporary Republicanism

1.00 – 2.30pm Lunch

Monday cont.

12

MDR1 Secretariat Private Dining Room 1 House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 2.30 – 4.00pm

SESSION 3

GENDER POLITICS & SEXUALITY




MIGRATION & REFUGEES


Changing Frames

Chair: Mhairi Cowden

Electoral 1

Chair: Maria Maley

Comparative Politics 5 International Relations 4

Chair: Sean Burges

Migration & Refugees 2

Chair: Gwenda Tavan


Chair: Craig Applegate

Kate Gleeson Abortion & ‘Choice’ in the Neoliberal Aftermath

Kcasey McLoughlin Of Merit & (Wo)Men: The politics of gender & judicial appointments

Kirsty McLaren Continuity & Change: Protest event analysis of the Australian Women's Movement 1970–2005

Helen Pringle Is Compulsory Voting an Illusion?

Will Sanders Analysing Electoral Systems Through Five Simple Questions: A journey of discovery from Northern Territory Local Government to the world of electoral science

Christoper Vas Public Engagement: A model for innovative policy collaboration

Andrew Banfield Courts, Legislatures & the Politics of Same-Sex Marriage

Fergal Davis ‘I Saw Two Shooting Stars Last Night’: Caution against wishing for constitutional reform of the UK Royal prerogative

Douglas Brown Canada & the Recession: Testing decentralized fiscal federalism

Guy Emerson Promoting ‘American’ Democracy: Challenges to US democracy promotion in Latin America

Laura Gil Back to the World: Colombia in United Nations-authorized peace operations

Lorena Oyarzun Serrano Opportunities & Challenges for Chilean International Insertion: Is it possible to transcend the commercial dimension?

Brian Galligan Boosting Regional Settlement of Migrants and Refugees in Australia: Policy initiatives and challenges

Amy Nethery Immigration Detention, Punishment, & the Australian Constitution

Alexander Reilly Executive Accountability for Immigration Detention

Paul Fawcett Historical Institutionalism & Critical Realism

Paul Belesky Crisis & Uncertainty or Business as Usual? A critique of the laissez-faire market ideology from a Polanyian perspective

Stephen Bell Hui Feng The Selective State & the Domestic Mediation of International Policy Diffusion: Evidence from Chinese monetary policy & central banking

John Mikler The Illusion of Market Power


Monday cont.

13

MDR 2 House of Reps 4 MDR 3 House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2


ETHNICITY, 'RACE', RELIGION & IDENTITY

ACADEMIC PUBLISHING ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS


2.30 – 4.00pm

SESSION 3 continued

Public Policy 2

Chair: John Uhr

Globalization & Radicalisation

Chair: Victoria Mason


Chair: Bruce Tranter

Society, Risk & Power

Chair: Nikola Regent

Suman Ojha Parliamentary Committees in Queensland during 1996–2001: How effective in scrutinising the executive?

Ben Rankin Alfred Deakin & the Politics of Australian Water Resources

John Warhurst Australia's Atheist Prime Minister: Julia Gillard's unbelief in historical context

Haroro Ingram The Radicalisation Process: An interdisciplinary approach

Shakira Hussein ‘Real’ Islamic Studies: Taqiyya & the racialisation of Muslim identity

Naser Ghobadzadeh Religious Secularity: An emerging backlash to the Islamic State of Iran

Geoffrey Stokes Andrew O'Neil Academic Publishing, Geoffrey Stokes (Australian Journal of Political Science) & Andrew O’Neil (The Australian Journal of International Affairs)

Brian Coffey Victorian Labor & the Environment: A legacy to be proud of?

Peter Ferguson Transcending the Growth Imperative: Ecological modernisation & beyond

Lou Wilson Fiona Kinner Urban Densification Policy & the Health of the Child

Clive Bean The Social Foundations of Risk

Andrew Klassen The Evolution of Political Legitimacy: Socioeconomic development & human needs

William Bosworth The Metatheoretical Significance of Power

4.00 – 4.30pm Afternoon Tea

4.30 – 5.30pm Professor Andrew Wells & Professor Marian Simms, ARC speakers—Members Dining Room

5.30 – 6.30pm Welcome Reception in Kings Hall, OPH

Tuesday 27 September 2011

14

8.30am Registration

9.00 – 10.00am Presidential Address by Professor Katharine Gelber, Generational Challenges in Australian Political Science—Members Dining Room

Secretariat Private Dining Room 1 House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 House of Reps 4 10.00 – 11.00am SESSION 4 Short session







Comparative Politics 6 Representing Women Chair: Shakira Hussein

International Relations 6 Chair: Constance Duncombe

International Relations 7 Chair: Tim Dunne

Comparative Politics 7 Public Policy 3 Chair: John Wanna

Lee Morgenbesser

Legitimacy, Neopatrimonialism and Management: A typology on authoritarian elections

Michael Miller Elections, Information & Policy Responsiveness in Hybrid Regimes

Aley Nassor The Democratic Transition in Tanzania: Parliamentary Authority & Executive Power in the House of Representatives of Zanzibar

Monica Costa Marian Sawer Women Acting for Women: The case of gender-responsive public finance in Timor-Leste

Ana Gilling Who are the Women Representing When They Claim to be Representing Women?

Reuben Steff Global Missile Defence: Agent of disorder or new co-operative mission?

Aiden Warren The Prague Vision: An assessment of Obama’s nuclear policy

Feng Zhang The Rise of Chinese Exceptionalism in International Relations

Andrew Kennedy Red Dragon, Green Energy: Techno-nationalism in China's approach to renewable energy

Sharon Bessell Vested Interests, Ideas & Compromise: The international politics of child labour

Elizabeth Thurbon Same But Different: Reviving the developmental state model by revisiting its ideational foundations

David Hundt Contesting Neo-Liberalism in South Korea: Financial crisis & beyond

Andrew Hindmoor, Keith Dowding, Aaron Martin The Agenda of ‘Policy Agendas in Australia’

House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2 AUSTRALIAN POLITICS

& GOVERNANCE POLITICAL & SOCIAL THEORY

Indigenous Politics Chair: Will Sanders

Political Thought, Public Policy and Management

Andrew Gunstone The Establishment of the 1991–2000 Australian Reconciliation Process

Diana Perche No Trespassing: Crisis & continuity in policy making around the permit system under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act

Geoff Cockfield The Architectural State

Michael Jackson ‘Yes, Prince:’Machiavelli's reign in management


T uesday cont.

15

11.30am – 12.30pm Keynote Speaker: Professor Donald Emmerson, Crisis, Uncertainty, and Democracy: Black Swans, Fat Tails, and the Futures of Political Science—Members Dining Room 12.30 – 2.00pm Lunch Women's Caucus (Private Dining Room) & Launch of the Environmental Politics and Policy Standing Group (Secretariat)

MDR 1 Secretariat Private Dining Room 1 House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 2.00 – 3.30pm SESSION 5







Federalism 1 Chair: Marian Sawer

Comparative Politics 8 Public Policy 4 Chair: John Wanna

International Relations 8 Chair: Reuben Steff

International Relations 9 Chair: Jim Jose

Identity, Space & the Locus of Enunciation

Deborah Brennan State Architecture, Gender Equity & the Politics of Childcare in Australia & Canada

Louise Chappell Jennifer Curtin Does Federalism Matter? The case of domestic/ family violence in Australia & New Zealand

Robyn Hollander Federalism & the Moral Policy Dilemma

Raul Sanchez Urribarri Contention Through Litigation in Latin America: Foundations for a comparative analysis

Hawzhin Azeez State Reconstructions, Nation-Building & Ayatollahs: An analysis of Iraq’s reconstruction failures

John Boswell Weighing the Evidence: Exploring rationality in Australia's obesity debate

Natalia Hanley Mental Illness in Policy Discourse: Locating the criminal justice system

Tracey Arklay Moving from Command to Collaboration: Queensland’s disaster management arrangements

Dan Halvorson A Question of Order: Prestige, status-quo powers & intervention in the periphery

Deborah Mayersen Operationalising the Preventive Component of the Responsibility to Protect: Strategies & implementation

David Mickler Nesam McMillan Locating 'Regime Change' in R2P & the ICC

Constance Duncombe The Twitter Revolution? Social media, representation & crisis in Iran & Libya

Timothy Lynch Bush, Obama & the Arab Spring: From crisis to uncertainty to democracy?

Adam Masters Privatised Policing on a Global Scale?: Interpol’s new partnerships

Brooke Rogers My Place or Ours? Renegotiating the meaning of place

Kerry McCallum Managing the Optics: Media representation & Indigenous policymaking

Lesley Pruitt Making Space, Creating Common Ground?

Benjamin Moffitt Rethinking Populism: Populism as a political style

MDR 2 MDR 3 Private Dining Room 2 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS



Environmental Politics 3 Chair: David Schlosberg

Government Business Chair: Peter Brent

Free Speech & Personal Autonomy Chair: Peter Balint

Delphine Rabet New Forms of Environmental Governance: Foreign firms & the state

Adam Simpson Climate Change, Energy, Justice & Security in Myanmar (Burma)

Hayley Stevenson John Dryzek Enhancing the Legitimacy of Multilateral Climate Governance: A deliberative democratic approach

Andrew Hindmoor Stephen Bell A Culture of Caution: Vanilla banking in Australia before, during & after the GFC

Brian Head Asset Sales: From financial necessity to policy opportunism?

Thomas Caunce The Rudd Government: Strengthening Labor’s social democratic ideology through Keynesian postulates

Michael Crozier Adrian Little Democratic Voice: Popular sovereignty in conditions of pluralization

Mhairi Cowden 'No Harm, No Foul' Australian Children’s Right to Know Their Genetic Parents

Joanne Lau Citizens, Residence & Democratic Participation

T uesday cont.

16

3.30 – 4.30pm Afternoon Tea

MDR1 Secretariat Private Dining Room 1 House of Reps 1 House of Reps 3 House of Reps 4 4.00 – 5.30pm SESSION 6





ETHNICITY, 'RACE' RELIGION & IDENTITY


Federalism 2

Chair: AJ Brown


Chair: Guy Emerson

Indigenous & Minority Rights & Multiculturalism

Chair: Julie Evans

Minority Government

Chair: John Warhurst

Alan Fenna Feminism & Federalism: Analytic considerations

Kim Rubenstein Australian Intergovernmental Relations: A gender & change perspective

Meryl Kenny Gender, Devolution & Political Representation: Evidence from the United Kingdom & Spain

Jikon Lai Crisis, Liberalism & Development: The evolution of Malaysia's financial sector since the Asian financial crisis

Allan McConnell Hindsight vs Foresight: Competing explanations for political failures to anticipate the global financial crisis

Craig Mark Domestic & Regional Politics of Japan, Post-3/11

Conor Keane Ten Years in Afghanistan: A comparative analysis of the Soviet & US occupations

Garry Rodan Caroline Hughes Idealogical Coalitions & the International Promotion of Social Accountability: The Philippines & Cambodia compared

Timothy Lynch ‘A Change of Leaders is the Joy of Fools’: Obama, Bush & continuity in American foreign policy

Lisa Barritt-Eyles Foreign Policies/Identity Performances: (Re)productions of American identity in US foreign policy practices

Ross Morrow The Killing of Osama Bin Laden & the Contradictions in US Policy, Practice & Accounts of the Event

Liam Von Thien Liberal Multiculturalism & the Challenge of Constructivist Theories of Ethnicity

Katherine Curchin Testing the Limits of the Politics of Recognition: Foxhunters in the United Kingdom

Dominic O'Sullivan Indigenity & the Politics of Ethnicity

Julie Evans Nesam McMillan Moving On? An interdisciplinary analysis of official responses to reports of structural injustice

John Uhr Andrew Banfield What’s Wrong with Minority Parliament? A comparison of Australian & Canadian experiences

John Wanna Making Pigs Ears from Silk Purses—devising & passing budgets when in minority government—the case of the first Gillard Budget of 2011–12

Tom King The Rise & Demise of the DLP


T uesday cont.

17

House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2 4.00 – 5.30pm

SESSION 6 continued



Electoral 2

Chair: Ian McAllister

Power, Games & Agents

Chair: Michael Miller

Jennifer Newton-Farrelly Using Uncertainty to Ensure Democracy: Drawing a responsive electoral system with competitive seats

Sarah John Leigh Hargreaves The Alternative Vote in Australia: Exacerbating a culture of adversarialism?

Aaron Martin Political Participation Among the Young in Australia: Testing Dalton's theory good citizen thesis

Yusaku Horiuchi Decomposition of Valence and Paradox of Primary Elections

Keith Dowding Turning Power Debates into Positive Sum Games

Andrew Hindmoor What's Wrong with Keith Dowding's Account of Systematic Luck & Power?

Stephen Bell Explaining Institutional Change: An agents in contexts approach

5.45 – 6.45pm APSA AGM, Members Dining Room

7.15pm – Conference Dinner, Gandel Hall, National Gallery of Australia

Wednesday 28 September 2011

18

8.30am Registration

MDR 1 Secretariat Private Dining Room 1 House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 9.00 – 10.30am SESSION 7







Sex & Policy

Chair: Katherine Smith


Chair: Hannah Murphy


Chair: John Ravenhill

Media, Development, Globalization & Democratization

Brendan Drew

A Culture of Silence: Designing a questionnaire to accommodate the Thai taboo on publicly talking about sex

Sara Meger The Role Patriarchy & the Political Economy in Wartime Sexual Violence: The case of Democratic Republic of Congo

Adele Garnier Institutional Complexity & Unintended Policy Outcomes: Australian & British asylum policies since the 1990s

Emma Blomkamp Comparing the Uncertain Terrain of Local Cultural Governance in Australia & New Zealand

Adam Graycar Corruption & Government: From state capture to municipal malfeasance

Umut Korkut Liberalization Troubles: Elitism, populism, and progressivism

Thomas Davis Brian Galligan ‘Normalising’ Human Rights in Asia: The problematic ASEAN intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights

Matthew Griggs Defending Minority Rights in Ethnic Nation States: Does the prospect of democratic nationalism pose a threat to the minority Uzbek population of Kyrgyzstan?

Liam Weeks Challenging the Omnipresence of Parties: Is STV an independent-friendly system?

Melissa Conley Tyler Public & Citizen Diplomacy in Australia

Melissa Conley Tyler e-Diplomacy: Lessons & prospects

Lucia Oriana International Law in Public Diplomacy

Jim Jose Trawling the Murky Shallows: Perceptions of Empire in the Straits settlements 1893–1915

Umut Ozguc The Material-Semiotic Turn in Critical Security Studies: Performativity, materiality & the Wall in the West Bank

Katrina Lee-Koo Protecting War-affected Children in post-2001 Afghanistan: An ontological challenge for IR?

Ramaswami Harindranath New Technologies, Gandhian Activism, & Democracy: Re-examining civil society

April Biccum Producing a Global Citizen? Development communication in Australia & Britain

Sabine Selchow The ‘Global’-isation of Contemporary Politics: Approaching an important symbolic dimension of contemporary politics

Max Halupka The Utilisation of Direct Democracy & Meritocracy on the Decision Making Process of the Decentralised Virtual Community Anonymous


Wednesday cont.

19

MDR 2 House of Reps 4 MDR 3 House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2


ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS




9.00 – 10.30am

SESSION 7 continued

Pakistan Today: Identity, Religion & Foreign Policy

Chair: Dave Mickler


Chair: Fabian Schuppert

Electoral 3

Chair: Maria Maley

General 2

Chair: John Wanna

Political & Cultural Community

Chair: Nicholas Barry

Muhammad Tariq Moj Deobandi Madaris: The counterculture context

Naeem Salik India-Pakistan Nuclear Competition: Implications for regional stability

Rizwan Zeb Traditional Power Structure & Ethno-political Conflict in Baluchistan: Target killing of Punjabi settlers as a case study

Robyn Eckersley Does Climate Leadership Matter?

Emma Wannell The Australian Climate Debate: Positioning Australia within an international climate change context

Bruce Tranter Party Leaders, Global Warming & Green Voting in Australia

Yusaku Horiuchi Meg Sato Electoral Redistricting, Incumbency Advantage, & Endogenous Candidate Selection

Richard Stanton Campaigning as an Independent: The view from a participant observer

Ian McAllister Clive Bean Juliet Pietsch Explaining the Outcome of the 2010 Australian Federal Election

Tod Moore Wretched States: Thinking about Australian unity since the 1890s

Harshan Kumarasingham The 1975 Dismissal: The view from Whitehall

Ashley Lavelle The Politics of the ‘Working Family’

Jo-Anne Pemberton Bodies on the Line: Justice, equality & conscription

Liam Von Thien Is There a Right to a Secure Cultural Community?

Peter Balint Neutrality & Diversity


Wednesday cont.

20

MDR 1 Secretariat House of Reps 1 House of Reps 2 House of Reps 3 House of Reps 4 11.00am – 12.30pm SESSION 8 GENDER POLITICS &

SEXUALITY INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS & INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY





Women & Representation

Chair: Sheila Jeffreys


Chair: Lucia Oriana


Chair: Lisa Barritt-Eyles


Chair: Katrina Lee-Koo

Monash Radicalisation Project

Chair: April Biccum

Social Networking, Civil Society & New Media

Bushra Chowdhury The Subservient Subalterns: Women in local government in Bangladesh

Heni Pancaningtyas The Gender Quota Movement in Indonesia

Norm Kelly Women's Representation in Melanesia: Prospects for the future

Adrian Bazbauers From Leading to Supporting Actor: The World Bank Group in a ‘Tale of Two Crises’: The response of the World Bank Group to the 2008 global financial crisis

Hannah Murphy The Global Governance of Core Labour Standards: Policy transfer & regime complexity

Scott Brenton Kate MacDonald Regulation by Remote Control? Motivations behind ethical consumption choices

Nobuhiro Ihara Rethinking the First Year of ASEAN, 1967–1968: How was the expansion of Indonesia’s influence in the region constrained?

Avery Poole The State & the Secretariat: Capacity & the norm of equality in ASEAN

Ann Capling John Ravenhill Multilateralising Regionalism: What role for the TPP?

Katherine Smith Gendering Neutrality: A feminist investigation of international humanitarian assistance & its gender framework

Naomi Atkins International as Personal: Discursive narratives of hegemonic masculinity in international relations

Melissa Conley Tyler The Under-Representation of Women in Australia’s International Affairs

Bruce McFarlane The Internet, Child Sex Offenders & Violent Radicalisation: Identity, commonalities & the way forward: The lessons that can be learnt in combating online violent radicalisation

Kate Barrelle From Citizen to Terrorist & Back Again: Identity in radicalisation, violent political extremism & disengagement

Andrew Zammit Explaining Australia-Lebanon Jihadist Connections

Stephen Owen Researching Subjectification & Surveillance in Social Network Sites

Philippa Collin Digitally Enhanced? Youth citizenship in the context of cybersafety policy

Michael Crozier David Easton’s Systems Analysis & the New Communications Ecology


Wednesday cont.

21

MDR 3 House of Reps 5 Private Dining Room 2




11.00am – 12.30pm

SESSION 8 continued

Public Policy 5

Chair: John Wanna

Party Politics

Chair: Maria Maley

Contemporary Political Theorists

Chair: Lisa Hill Alan Fenna

Crisis, Uncertainty, & the Australian Welfare State

Brian Head Policy Advice & Research Evidence: Is academic research 'lost in translation'?

Richard Baldwin Aged Care Policy in Australia: Who sets the agenda?

Jonathan Strauss The Significance of the Organisational Origins of the Greens

Shaun Wilson Working Class Liberals

Geoffrey Robinson Labor’s Century in New South Wales

George Crowder Berlin & Rawls

Bronwyn McDonald The Political Legacy of Iris Marion Young: Situating Responsibility and Justice

Nicholas Barry On Cohen, Community, & Equality

12.30 – 2.00pm Head of Departments Lunch—Private Dining Room

xxxxxx

APSA Conference 2011 Abstracts 23

ANDREW, Merrindahl The Australian National University [email protected] Meagre Harvest or Just Poorly Documented? Tracking women's movement legacies through government records Critics have said that the second‐wave women’s movement in Australia produced only a ‘meagre harvest’—that the movement’s legacy is insubstantial and disappointing. In fact, since the 1970s there has been a proliferation of organisations in the government and non‐government sectors, which are, however imperfectly, carrying forward the gender equality goals of the movement. However, it proves to be frustratingly difficult to keep track of women’s policy machinery in government, because the establishment, reorganisation and abolition of agencies are not documented in an organised and accessible way. Apart from posing a challenge to feminist researchers and activists, the difficulties of tracking women’s policy machinery reveal an important shortcoming in public accountability more generally: machinery of government changes are politicised and are subject to the distortion characteristic of a risk‐averse fixation on political marketing. If, as Marsh has argued, ‘every wholly new domestic issue on the Australian political agenda in the past 30 or so years was originally championed by a social movement’, then our ability to track the impact of those movements on the machinery of government is crucial to our understanding of Australian politics.

Monday, 11.30am, House of Representatives Room 4 APPLEGATE, Craig and SADLEIR, Chris University of Canberra [email protected]; [email protected] Reasonable Insurance in Trade and Investment: Australia and its preferential trade agreements The Productivity Commission final report into preferential trade agreements criticised them for not offering substantial improvements in welfare compared with the status quo. The Productivity Commission advised that unilateral liberalisation is the best way to increase the future aggregate welfare of Australia. However, the relevant comparison might not be with the status quo but with policies and laws regarding trade and investment that might conceivably exist in the future. These might be less liberal than those that currently exist. A current government might want to bind the actions of future governments, both here and overseas. An international treaty that is legally binding can feasibly be an effective mechanism for doing this. Such treaties can act as pre‐commitment devices to constrain future changes in domestic law and policy. Such treaties could increase the confidence of potential future foreign investors that their investments will be protected. Even if the commitment made to foreign investors is of the same type as that made elsewhere, then it might still have a confidence boosting effect. The same commitment made in different forums might be more binding on future governments than making that commitment in only one forum.

Monday, 11.30am, House of Representatives Room 3

24 Abstracts APSA Conference 2011

ARKLAY, Tracey Griffith University [email protected] Moving From Command to Collaboration: Queensland’s disaster management arrangements Dwight D. Eisenhower once said that while plans are useless, planning is indispensable. These words can be applied as equally to the area of disaster management as to the battleground. No disaster is the same, and so flexibility and adaptability are essential attributes of any state disaster plan. At the time of writing, Queensland is recovering from some of the most damaging natural disasters in living memory. A Commission of Inquiry is investigating the terrible events that cost the state so much in both human and economic terms. This paper examines the state’s disaster management arrangements. Queensland differs from other jurisdictions in Australia and internationally in that it has adopted an explicitly ‘bottom up’ approach to managing crises—eschewing centralised, command and control arrangements to a power sharing, collaboration that authorises local government authorities to act and make crucial decisions in the first instance. Based on interviews with key personnel, evidence from the current Commission of Inquiry and literature from previous disasters, this paper assesses how successful these arrangements have been in managing Queensland’s recent ‘summer of sorrow’.

Tuesday, 2pm, Private Dining Room 1

ATKINS, Naomi University of Canberra [email protected] International as Personal: Discursive narratives of hegemonic masculinity in international relations Combining feminist theory with international relations theory, Cynthia Enloe declared that the ‘international is personal’. Subsequently, this phrase has been employed to demonstrate the effect of war or political violence on women, women’s role in interstate relations, or women’s absence from international politics and international relations theory itself. Common in all of these works is an understanding that the individual, the state and the international system are mutually constitutive. Employing this notion, this paper examines the role of phallocentric discursive narratives beyond the personal and civil realms, to its location in global politics. It will seek to explore the discursive imagery and representations of valorised masculinity and devalued femininity that frame the United States’ foreign relations. Narrating itself as the hegemonic man in the international system, the United States’ actions of empire building can be read as actions of hypermasculinity, as it seeks to maintain dominance through the discursive subordination of other feminised states, exaggerating its own masculinity as universal. Locating the manipulations of masculine and feminine identities within discourse, rhetoric, representation and imagery, this paper demonstrates that the interrelation between all levels of analysis in international relations can be identified where similar phallic narratives pervade each political arena.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 2


AZEEZ, Hawzhin University of Newcastle [email protected] State Reconstructions, Nation‐Building and Ayatollah’s: An analysis of Iraq’s reconstruction failures The sphere of state reconstruction is one of the most prominent fields and areas of concern for contemporary political science. Since the end of the World War II, the decolonisation period and the Cold War, the state‐building sphere has been fraught with inconsistencies, lack of success and devastating failures. Vast human rights violations, increased levels of Internally Displaced People, large migrant flaws, drugs, disease, poverty and terrorism have all emerged as a direct consequence of state weaknesses and failures. Pervious cases such as Somalia and Rwanda have demonstrated the human and costly danger of lack of attention on state weakness and failure. Current cases such as Afghanistan and Iraq continue to challenge state‐builders, policy makers and theorists. Many have pointed out the more obvious causes of failures within the field, including lack of international commitment, inadequate military and security personal provisions, as well as policy failures. An analysis of Iraq’s state‐building demonstrates the limited attention on Nation‐building measures. This paper asserts that state‐building measures are distinct from that of nation‐building policies. Where state‐building focuses on democratisation and institution‐building, nation‐building policies ought to focus on addressing societal cleavages and reconciliation. Iraq demonstrates the state‐centric nature of reconstructions that fails to consider the complex state‐society relations and causes of state failure. Thus, an adequate and successful reconstruction entails an in depth analysis of the case with appropriate state centred and nation centred policies that establishes a more holistic approach to rebuilding conflict ridden societies.

Tuesday, 2pm, Secretariat BAEZA FREER, Jaime, GAMBOA VALENZUELA, Ricardo, LOPEZ VARAS, Miguel Angel Universidad de Chile [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] From Polarisation to the Centre of the Political Spectrum: Party manifestos in Chile before and after authoritarianism Using Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) methodology for the Presidential manifestos between 1958 and 1973, and also, 1989 and 2010, this research provides a spatial analysis that shows the evolution of each political sector’s manifestos. Within this frame, most candidates’ manifestos since 1990 move to the centre of the spectrum, chiefly in socio‐economic issues, and differently than previously to the Authoritarian regime. The aforementioned trend can be explained by the end of the Cold War, and also the need for greater coalitions in the new democracy. Moreover, there is a twofold reason that works in two ways. First, the Centre‐Left coalition needed to show respect and support for market economy. In that way it could overcome suspicious from the business sector, after that many of the progressive leaders were in Government with President Allende. Conversely, the right wing candidates needed to show support for Democracy despite being leaders of parties that were involved in the Pinochet regime.

Monday, 11.30am, Secretariat


BALDINO, Daniel and DRUM, Martin University of Notre Dame [email protected]; [email protected] Stop and Search Without Reasonable Suspicion? The call for increased police powers in Western Australia The Barnett Government's proposed 'stop and search' legislation has attracted much controversy. A wide range of critics have expressed grave concerns about the legislation. The new laws will give police unrestricted powers to stop and search any individual in specified areas at specified times. At the same time, the police have consistently argued that they will need enhanced powers to stop and search people during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Perth in October 2011. In response, the West Australian government introduced legislation into parliament in February 2011 giving police officers special powers to crack down on protesters during CHOGM. This paper will look at the changing legislation on stop and search in Western Australia and identify the government's current proposals and some of the central issues that arise from it, including whether such new laws are disproportionate or justified.


BALDWIN, Richard University of Technology Sydney [email protected] Aged Care Policy in Australia: Who sets the agenda? Aged care is a turbulent political environment and successive Australian Governments have shaped and developed policy on residential aged care not only to meet emerging issues but also to develop the program towards their own objectives and values. The current Productivity Commission Review is the latest of several major reviews over the past decade and their interim report suggests recommendations for significant changes in the sector. The Aged Care Program currently pays aged care service providers to operate nearly 3000 residential aged care facilities across Australia providing care for about 170,000 frail and disabled residents no longer able to be cared for at home. Spending on aged care in Australia currently consumes about 0.8% of GDP (about $9.6 billion) and is predicted to rise to 1.9% of GDP by the middle of the century; suggesting that the sector will continue to be a focus for contested policy decisions. The Council of Australia Government in April 2010 agreed that the Australia Government would be solely responsible for aged care in the future ending the ‘blame game’ between different levels of governments but perhaps shifting it to a contest with aged care providers. Providers of residential aged care services are, naturally, intensely interested in the development of policy by the government, and, like other stakeholders, will seek to influence policy development to ensure their operations remain financially viable and return acceptable profits and surpluses. The highly regulated industry creates a symbiotic relationship between government and aged care providers placing these providers in a potentially powerful position to influence policy. An examination of key trends in this industry demonstrates that, despite the dynamic policy environment, the industry remains stable and exhibits clear and strong operational trends; for example, in the trends towards larger aged care facilities, lower bed occupancy and longer length of stay of residents in care. The steady trends would appear to be inconsistent with the numerous changes in policy. It would appear almost as if an ‘invisible hand’ was guiding the industry. A number of these trends may be in the financial interest of the aged care providers but their impact on aged residents is less clear. This paper explores possible explanation to the policy process around aged care, particularly the possible existence of a strong policy network that sets the agenda for the continuing debate on aged care policy.


The paper argues that there is little evidence to explain how aged care policy decision are made and calls for more research into the way the Australian Government develops aged care policy and which stakeholders influence these policy decisions: decisions that have significant impact on this highly vulnerable group of older Australians.

Wednesday, 11am, Members Dining Room 3

BALINT, Peter University of NSW @ ADFA [email protected] Neutrality and Diversity Almost all theories of multiculturalism start with a rejection of liberal neutrality as at best being inadequate, and at worst unjust. This rejection of neutrality—in both liberal theory and practice—then clears the way for the theorist's own particular non‐neutral theory of diversity. The question of what it is they are rejecting is not helped by the fact that liberal neutrality is a complex concept that could mean several different things. In this paper, I challenge this move and defend a conception of neutrality which is neither ‘difference‐blind’ nor one that recognises all differences, and further, one that involves a strong preference for the state ‘standing back’ in relation to the various ways of life of its citizens.

Wednesday, 9am, Private Dining Room 2

BANFIELD, Andrew and UHR, John The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected] What’s Wrong with Minority Parliament? A comparison of Australian and Canadian experiences Since the mid‐2000s, there is a trend toward minority Parliaments in Commonwealth countries. Canada started the trend, electing three successive federal minority parliaments. Not to be left out, Australia and Britain soon followed, electing their own minority parliaments in 2010. A number of important questions emerge from this trend, not least of which is identifying the implications for parliamentary government. Political commentators seem to regard minority parliaments as difficult arrangements to manage. Indeed, some regard them as antithetical to Westminster parliamentary democracy. We disagree. Paying particular attention to the Canadian and Australian examples, we attempt a couple of things. First we draw on contemporary and historical examples of minority parliaments in an attempt to identify the variables that make for a successful minority parliament. Second, we attempt to draw some lessons on successfully managing these unfamiliar circumstances. Finally, we offer some preliminary conclusions on what minority parliaments mean for the future of Westminster democracy.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 4

BANFIELD, Andrew The Australian National University [email protected] Courts, Legislatures, and the Politics of Same‐Sex Marriage This paper contributes comparative evidence to a longstanding debate about what kinds of institutional checks and balances best promote rights enhancing policy moderation. One side


in the debate sees moderation flowing from a ‘dialogue’ between dispassionate courts exercising ‘strong‐form’ review and impassioned (hence extremist) legislatures. The other side, believing that courtroom ‘rights talk’ fans the flames of extremist polarization, stresses the moderating influence of other (generally more ‘political’) checks and balances. In this second view, courts can indeed contribute to a moderating inter‐branch ‘dialogue,’ but are more apt to have this beneficial influence when they exercise some kind of ‘weak‐form’ review. This question of institutional moderation is addressed through a so‐called ‘two‐sided’ moral issue: same‐sex marriage. While middle ground positions typically exist on such issues, they are often overwhelmed by the polar extremes. Moreover, these types of issues are precisely the kinds of issues most likely to end up in court, especially under rights documents of various kinds. They thus provide the best test of competing claims about the moderating or polarizing influence of judicial power or legislative power. This study brings theoretical refinement by situating the same‐sex marriage debate in a broad comparative review of how the issue has fared in the liberal democratic world. By paying particular attention liberal democratic policy positions, comparative judicial opinion, and public opinion data, this case provides some, but not unqualified, support for the courtroom ‘polarization’ thesis. The resulting evidence underlines the relevance of the distinction between strong‐form and weak‐form judicial review and need to more systematically exploit that distinction in assessing the moderating or polarizing tendencies of judicialized ‘rights talk.’

Monday, 2.30pm, Private Dining Room 1

BARRELLE, Kate Monash University [email protected] From Citizen to Terrorist and Back Again: Identity in radicalisation, violent political extremism & disengagement In the decade since 9/11 the security strategies of most governments have focused on counter‐terrorism initiatives and more recently, on prevention and counter‐radicalisation efforts. Both are necessary but there is a third element that has not received sufficient attention—that being how and why people leave terrorism. In fact, most people who join radical or violent political groups or movements do leave. Relatively few stay to the bitter end. This article explores the phenomenon of leaving extremist groups and presents an analysis of eight in‐depth interviews with former members of extremist groups. It is not easy to leave an illegal or underground group whose social/political purpose you strongly identify with, especially if there are high, sometimes lethal, barriers to exit. People leave in many different ways: some are forced out by the group, some depart voluntary, and others are extracted forcibly by family or police. The terrorism and violent extremism literature increasingly makes the distinction between disengagement and deradicalisation. Disengagement is when someone reduces or stops using extreme methods, and may or may not involve deradicalisation (which requires a change in belief). Social scientists have been studying behaviour and attitude change for decades, and have much to contribute to the discussion and formulation of counter‐radicalisation and deradicalisation policy and strategy. In particular social psychology has developed a robust and rich set of applied theories loosely termed ‘social identity theory’, which offer powerful explanations for the intergroup conflict and hint at potential disengagement and integration strategies. In an effort to better understand these complex processes of disengagement, deradicalisation and social reintegration, in‐depth interviews with former radical and violent extremists were conducted, and questions of identity explored. The participants of this study are former members of three very different ideology groups/movements—militant Islamist, militant Tamil separatist and radical ‘direct


action’ environmentalist. Detailed data from interviews with eight former extremists in the Australian context will be presented, with general findings from a total of 14 interviews reported. Notable findings include the important distinction between disengagement and deradicalisation. Whilst every one of the 14 former extremists interviewed has disengaged, only 36% have deradicalised. This is despite the fact that many people leave these groups because the level of violence is too much, or too ineffective. It is concluded that a person must significantly adjust their sense of self at a personal and social level in order to relinquish radical ideologies, and that without this, meaningful social integration into the wider community will be compromised.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 3 BARRITT‐EYLES, Lisa University of Newcastle Lisa.Barritt‐[email protected] Foreign Policies/Identity Performances: (Re)productions of American Identity in US foreign policy practices Announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, US President Barack Obama (re)cited historically consistent themes of American identity to frame the operation as the ‘pursuit of justice’; a reminder ‘that America can do whatever we set our mind to.’ Obama’s speech encapsulated both the exceptionalism and exemplar themes of American identity, performatively reproducing political and cultural representations of that identity. References to the ‘greatness of our country and the determination of the American people,’ resonated not only with those who macabrely celebrated in the streets, but also those at home, comforted by Obama’s declaration that killing bin Laden meant ‘Justice has been done.’ His speech reaffirmed the narratives of American primacy and identity, as ‘one nation under God, indivisible, with justice and liberty for all,’ thereby justifying the foreign policy practices of his own and preceding administrations. This paper explores the potency of representations of American identity, and is part of a larger project, which aims to problematise corporatised American identity and its influence on US foreign policy practices in the post‐Cold War period. Accepting that it can be difficult to establish direct correspondence between identity and specific strategies, analysis focuses on performatively reproduced themes and recurrent performances of American identity. Research is informed by Hofstadter’s work on the paranoid style in American politics, Galtung’s Manifest Theology, and Wills on the (re)emergence of Christian extremism. The paper concludes that the politics of identity are pertinent to understanding a consistency and continuity in American foreign policy discursive practices, regardless of who is in power.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 1 BARRY, Nicholas La Trobe University [email protected] On Cohen, Community, and Equality In Jerry Cohen’s last book, Why Not Socialism? he presents a short (and qualified) defence of socialism, using a hypothetical camping trip as a device to demonstrate the intuitive appeal of the socialist way of life. Cohen argues that the common sense mode of organising a camping trip reflects socialist principles of equality and community. While recognising the appeal of Cohen’s argument, critics have argued that his commitment to the principle of community clashes with his support for a luck egalitarian theory of equality. This paper will explore the


relationship between luck egalitarianism and community in Cohen’s work. It will argue that although there is tension between the two principles, this does not reflect any inconsistency on Cohen’s part or constitute a decisive objection to luck egalitarianism.


BAZBAUERS, Adrian The Australian National University [email protected] From Leading to Supporting Actor: The World Bank Group in a ‘Tale of Two Crises’: The response of the World Bank Group to the 2008 global financial crisis In moments of crisis and uncertainty, the World Bank Group, for better or worse, has time and again stepped forward to assist its middle‐ and low‐income member countries confront the economic, political, and social challenges they face. Over the past decade or so, two financial crises have defined the Bretton Woods institution: the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. The former was a defining moment in its life, it being a leading actor, alongside the International Monetary Fund, acting in response as the event unfolded. However, with the latter, the greatest instance of crisis and uncertainty yet facing the World Bank Group, it has been relegated to the position of unsung supporting actor, largely uncredited for its activities by academia and the broader news media. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the response of the World Bank Group to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, juxtaposing its activities to those of the last major financial crisis it was intimately involved with, the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. In doing so, the goal of this paper is to discuss changes in its approach to development assistance, lessons learnt from times of crisis, and what all of this entails for the future.

Wednesday, 11am, Secretariat BEAN, Clive and KENDALL, Gavin Queensland University of Technology [email protected]; [email protected] The Social Foundations of Risk Ulrich Beck's argument about risk society emphasises, among other things, the pervasiveness of risk. As a feature of the human condition in the contemporary, globalised, world that distinguishes the present from the past, risk is widespread across society and affects all social strata. While Beck has gestured towards the irregular distribution of contemporary risks, nonetheless he has suggested that traditional structural entities—class and wealth—no longer provide the key interpretive frameworks for the calculation of susceptibility. In short, the tentacles of risk are long and almost no one is out of reach. Yet, while the risk society thesis has generated a large theoretical literature, there is very little in the way of research that marries theorising to original data collection. This paper represents an attempt to addresses this gap by using empirical data to investigate whether risk is more textured than Beck's account suggests. Focusing on health as a domain of risk, the paper uses data from a national sample survey of the Australian electorate to investigate the extent to which social divisions structure perceptions of risk within the general population. The findings suggest that various aspects of social stratification, such as income, occupation and education, do indeed play a role in shaping perceptions of risk.



BELESKY, Paul University of Queensland [email protected] Crisis and Uncertainty or Business as Usual? A critique of the laissez‐faire market ideology from a Polanyian perspective John Maynard Keynes declared: ‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else’. In this context, the worst of all despotisms is indeed the heartless tyranny of ideas. This paper argues there is a need to reconceptualise the notions of development, the market and society beyond the tyranny of the laissez‐faire market ideology and its philosophical underpinnings. This essay contends that ideas and ideologies influence and shape our socio‐political reality; thus, by creating analytical ‘space’ for new ideas beyond the tyranny of the market ideology, it is possible to allow ‘space’ for an alternate socio‐political reality. This alternative vision of politics and society includes the possibilities of re‐embedding the economy in society and reconceptualising the notions of development and the market. Karl Polanyi’s influential treatise The Great Transformation is an exemplar of this type of analytical approach. For Polanyi, the greatest tragedy of the Great Depression of 1929 was the ‘social devastation of an uncontrolled system—the market economy’. Half a century later, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Polanyi’s insights continue to resonate, as society once again faces the potential devastation of the ‘utopian’ institution of the self‐regulated market. Despite Keynes prophetic vision of the ‘end of laissez‐faire’, there has been a revival of the free market ideology in recent decades. However, despite this revival, Polanyi provides an enlightening vision of the inevitable ‘end of laissez‐faire’. His prediction of economic disorder provides a vivid elucidation of the recent global financial crisis, 'In retrospect our age will be credited with having seen the end of the self‐regulated market … Hundreds of millions had been afflicted by the scourge of inflation … stabilization of currencies became the focal point of the political thought of peoples and governments'. One of Polanyi’s foremost accomplishments was his astute ability to grasp the ideational nature of political, economic and social systems. Polanyi’s work has critical implications for development studies, as the concept of development is also ‘conceived within an ideological framework’. This essay proposes that a Polanyian perspective offers an alternative conceptual framework for understanding contemporary struggles over development and the recent global financial crisis.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 3 BELL, Stephen University of Queensland [email protected] Explaining Institutional Change: An agents in contexts approach Prominent institutionalist theories, including rational choice, historical and sociological institutionalism have developed rather ‘structuralist’ accounts of how institutions shape agents. This has led to highly constrained views of agency and to difficulties in explaining institutional change. This paper develops an alternative account based on a particular variant of historical institutionalism, using an agent‐centered approach to explain institutional change. The approach takes full account of the dialectics of structure and agency and argues that institutions not only constrain but can also empower actors. Above all, the approach argues that the traditional focus on agents within intermediate institutions needs to be expanded to


include an analysis of how agents and institutions interact through time with a range of wider contexts or domains involving crises, power, policy, ideational and structural dynamics. The approach is illustrated using empirical examples that show how such interactions can enhance agency and propel institutional change.

Tuesday, 4pm, Private Dining Room 2 BELL, Stephen and FENG, Hui University of Queensland [email protected]; [email protected] The Selective State and the Domestic Mediation of International Policy Diffusion: Evidence from Chinese monetary policy and central banking Most studies of policy diffusion have featured a ‘selection bias’, focusing on strong cases of diffusion, and an ‘outside‐in’ approach that emphasises external impacts on domestic policy. In this study, we focus on the diffusion process in China, especially in shaping its monetary policy and central banking in the era of market‐oriented reform since 1978. Utilizing a particular version of historical institutionalism, we examine how external and domestic factors interact to shape diffusion and which diffusion mechanisms have been the most significant in China’s case. We argue that even in the notionally constraining environment of central banking and monetary policy, there has been much room for manœuvre and that the broad result has not featured a pattern of strong diffusion and policy convergence. China’s somewhat iconoclastic approach thus points to a ‘selective state’, to one that has substantially charted its own course in central banking and monetary policy. At the same time, external influences have been selectively adopted though heavily mediated by domestic choices and institutions.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 3 BESSELL, Sharon The Australian National University [email protected] Vested Interests, Ideology and Compromise: The international politics of child labour Responding appropriately to child labour in the global South continues to present significant challenges for both international organisations and governments. In 1999 the International Labour Organization adopted Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which aimed to bring about a consensus position on child labour and provide a foundation for policy and action. It also aimed to reconcile deep divisions between those advocating the elimination of child labour and those defending children’s right (or need) to work. In practice, the Convention achieved an uneasy compromise, and child labour remains a deeply divisive issue. This paper critically analyses the international politics of child labour since the early 1990s, exploring why an international consensus has proven so difficult to achieve and examining the positions and interests of key players. It also explores the perspectives of working children based on research with children in Indonesia.

Tuesday, 10am, House of Representatives, Room 3


BETTS, Judith University of Technology Sydney [email protected] The Changing Australian Politics of WMD Over the Course of the Iraq War. Political agendas and press coverage Weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were at the centre of the US, UK and Australian governments’ arguments for going to war in Iraq and the Bush Administration suffered a considerable loss in standing, as did Blair in the UK, when the intelligence ‘evidence’ they had produced before the war was later discredited. In all three countries there were multiple inquiries into the reasons behind the intelligence ‘failures’. In Australia, however, despite public opposition to the war and continuing partisan division over the commitment of troops, the Prime Minister appeared to survive the war unscathed: the Government was returned with a majority in both Houses in the 2004 elections. In the US the Iraq war prompted a great deal of soul‐searching by the media and apologies to readers by the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the UK the BBC conducted an internal review of Iraq coverage. In Australia, some commentators suggested that the media failed in their duty to their publics by failing to challenge the Government over Iraq. This paper will look at the way the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and The Australian reported on WMD at different stages of the war: before the invasion, during the invasion and in the post‐invasion period until the fifth anniversary of the war in 2008. Drawing on data from a wider research project, this paper will look at the ways in which the SMH and The Australian differed in their coverage of WMD, in particular editorial differences, placement with related themes and positioning in the paper. The data are drawn from a content analysis looking at voices and themes covered during nine different sample periods through the different stages of the war. The analysis draws on critiques of the media and the Iraq war, the literature around agenda‐setting, agenda building and framing, and the literature around the role of the media in democracy.


BICCUM, April The Australian National University [email protected] Producing a Global Citizen? Development communication in Australia and Britain Development as a project has received a blow to its legitimacy in some sectors, and yet it has radically altered with the take up of new communications technologies and it has seen an expansion in the types of actors involved (such as celebrity advocates). While the Millennium Development Goals have brought greater awareness of the urgent need for development to metropolitan populations, the contested and political nature of development has not been communicated, instead there has been a narrowing of the definitions of the key terms that provide metropolitan populations with an adequate understanding of ‘poverty’, ‘development’, ‘globalization’ and ‘empire’. Recently there has been an expansion in development advocacy, including both direct government funding, intra‐national spectacles (such as Live8) and private sector actors with increasing involvement of high profile philanthropists and celebrities. At the same time neo‐liberal paradigms for development have undergone substantial challenge in the form of grassroots mass protest, civil society critique and state level nationalizations. Metropolitan governments increasingly deem it necessary to inform domestic populations of the need for and value of development and to produce in them a sense of Global Citizenship. This paper is a comparison of the way development gets


promoted to domestic audiences in Australia and Britain. It argues that rather than producing a sense of 'Global Citizenship' that is cognizant of the debates around development, poverty and globalization, rather it's being communicated in a way that constitutes a shift toward free market principles in development advocacy.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 3 BLOMKAMP, Emma University of Auckland [email protected] Comparing the Uncertain Terrain of Local Cultural Governance in Australia and New Zealand Local governments in Australia and New Zealand have long contributed to the cultural life of their communities through the provision or facilitation of libraries, community halls, public art, community arts programmes, community festivals, and other public facilities. Yet the place and purpose of cultural policy at the local government level has never been clear in either of these countries. Requirements to report on outcomes have only complicated the terrain for local authorities faced with limited resources and whose influence is mediated by various other governmental and non‐governmental agencies. This paper makes the case for conducting an interpretive comparison of cultural governance at the local level in Australia and New Zealand. Although this level of government is characterised by a diverse range of structures and policies, there is sufficient similarity in the legislative framework, traditions and organisational culture of local government in these two countries to compare the common challenges they face in defining and evaluating their role in community cultural development. Exploring the tensions implicit in a post‐positivist comparative study, this paper argues that an interpretive approach usefully highlights both the contingency and the power of particular discourses in governance and in the cultural sector. Such an analysis draws attention to the difficulty in evaluating the impact of local strategies and programmes, particularly when dealing with the uncertain and often intangible outcomes of cultural policy.

Wednesday, 9am, Secretariat

BOSWELL, John The Australian National University [email protected] Weighing the Evidence: Exploring rationality in Australia's obesity debate Evidence is at the heart of recent moves to promote rational policymaking. It underlies the deliberative turn in democratic theory and practice, in which the development, dissemination and evaluation of evidence is thought to be an integral component of rational decision‐making procedures. It is more explicit still in the normative push for evidence‐based policymaking where, even within thoughtful accounts that highlight the different values and types of knowledge brought to bear on complex and contested issues, evidence (in all its forms) is considered the basis of rational decision‐making. But a related body of work appears to cast doubt on these ambitions. It emphasises the importance of narrative in public debate, showing that actors rely on narratives to interpret and argue about political problems. Instinctively, the drama, conflict and emotion associated with narrative seem at odds with the sober collection, discussion and assessment of evidence. Does the pervasive influence of narrative dash the hopes for rational policy debate? Using Australia's obesity debate as a case study, this paper analyses how evidence is regarded, constituted and used in competing narratives across a


range of sites of policy discussion. The findings show that each of the competing narratives invokes a multiplicity of approaches to evidence and weaves together a combination of different types of knowledge. This is interpreted to suggest that, rather than playing a spoiling or corrupting function, narratives play a vital role in allowing actors right across Australia's obesity debate to rationally develop, discuss and evaluate evidence.

Tuesday, 2pm, Private Dining Room 1 BOSWORTH, William The Australian National University [email protected] The Metatheoretical Significance of Power Much of the literature on the measurement of power has been concerned, first and foremost, with how one might define the concept of power. This has led to attempts to rationally justify the various definitions through philosophical argument. Such justifications have been described by some (like William Connolly) as moral arguments. It is generally accepted that the process of argumentation is a process of persuasion. Certainly, an argument is usually put forward in order to persuade agents to change their beliefs. The concept of persuasion features heavily in the definitional disputes themselves—whether it should be clustered in with the power concept, or left to its own devices as a free‐standing concept. Either way, the debates concerning persuasion centre on persuasion’s relation to power. This leaves a tricky theoretical problem. The definitional proposals for the concept of power rest on the very concept(s) they are trying to define. If we accept a proposal, say, it might consequently change the way we evaluate proposals in future and could—if we were to do things over—refute our initial decision to accept the proposal. From here things could spiral into a hopeless cycle fast. How then should we evaluate such proposals? One possible solution would be to apply a proposed definition of power to the very act in which it was proposed and then judge it by, first, consistency criteria, second by the quantity of questions it leaves begged (particularly moral questions), and then finally by its scope. This paper will investigate this option and explain the importance of the theoretical problem to political science. To do so it will look at the prospects of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language to provide a framework in which this evaluation might be done.

Monday, 2.30pm, Private Dining Room 2 BRENNAN, Deborah University of New South Wales [email protected] State Architecture, Gender Equity and the Politcs of Childcare in Australia and Canada This paper will examine the impact of state structures and multilevel governance on childcare and parental leave policy in two federations, Australia and Canada. Most comparative social policy and welfare regime literature ignores state architecture, treating unitary state forms as the norm and focusing on national government and policy‐making. Typically, advocacy and policy initiatives at the international and meso‐level scales are neglected or under‐explored. Our paper examines the impact of different scales of government within each country, and considers the ways in which international organisations (the OECD and UNICEF in particular) have influenced domestic policy‐making and child care advocacy. We place particular emphasis on the extent to which meso‐level institutions (states, provinces, cities) have been used as


laboratories for policy innovation. Finally we will explore the strategies adopted by women’s organisations in relation to the various scales or sites of action in each country. This involves consideration of the domestic strategies employed by gender equality seekers and the ways in which local state structures shape and constrain engagement with the international arena.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 1

BRENTON, Scott, MACDONALD, Kate and BALATON‐CHRIMES, Samantha University of Melbourne sbrenton @unimelb.edu.au; [email protected]; [email protected] Regulation by Remote Control? Motivations behind ethical consumption choices The legitimacy of market based accountability mechanisms is viewed by many to be premised on the assumption that consumers are holding companies responsible for unethical behaviour, judged from the perspective of the welfare of workers and communities impacted directly by the social regulatory standards. Yet this assumes not only that consumers are motivated primarily by concern for these groups, but also that they have sufficient understanding of the complexities of the regulatory problem to make appropriate strategic choices about which regulatory strategies they should support via the consumption choices. In the regulation of global production and trade, an important role is now played by market‐based accountability systems, in which the ‘ethical’ purchasing choices of consumers indirectly regulate the production and trade of a wide range of consumer products. The role of ethical consumerism as a key driver of private governance arrangements raises important questions concerning both the effectiveness and legitimacy of private governance. While non‐state governance arrangements can provide a mechanism for the accountability of transnational companies, consumer‐driven mechanisms tend to rest on accountability structures in which the control rests with consumers in the economic north, rather than with producers and workers more directly affected by the operation of these regulatory norms. The competing motivations underlying consumer choices have important implications for the capacity of consumer‐driven governance schemes to be responsive to the needs and preferences of workers and communities whose lives they regulate. In particular, this research aims to ascertain the relative influence on decision making of access to information versus systematic understandings or misunderstandings of the complex nature of transnational production and consumption; and the impact of broad political values and commitments (eg concern human rights) and their relation to different aspects of individual consumer identity. These factors have significant implications for understanding the potential growth and sustainability of private governance systems, and therefore their significance within a wider system of transnational economic governance. Understanding the competing motivations that underpin ethical consumption choices is therefore of central importance for the design of non‐governmental regulatory systems. Drawing on a focus group research, this study aims to unpack the competing motivations of consumer choice. Findings will inform the design of social regulatory systems that are both sustainable, and responsive to the needs of marginalized communities and workers involved in transnational production. The central aim of this research is to develop a systemic theoretical and empirical grounding for analysing the motivational drivers of ethical consumerism.



BROWN, AJ Griffith University [email protected] Where Public Policy Meets Law (Or Does It?) Where does public policy fit into public law in the modern day—if anywhere? This paper draws on the author's recent biography of Michael Kirby (Paradoxes and Principles) to explore the ongoing conundrum of when and how judges are and aren't prepared to admit the public policy impacts and implications of judicial decision‐making. Even Michael Kirby, Justice of the High Court of Australia 1996–2009 and most famous for breaking the taboo on judicial use of the words 'public policy' since the 1980s, has been confused and confusing in his own rationalisations of desired relationships between public policy and judge‐made law. Is there a solution to the seemingly permanent disjunct between concepts of politics and of law?

Monday, 11.30am, Members Dining Room 2 BROWN, Douglas St Francis Xavier University [email protected] Canada and the Recession: Testing decentralized fiscal federalism The global recession of 2008–09 presented a significant, sharp decline of economic fortunes for Canada, but nonetheless a milder effect than many other countries. A combination of good luck and good management reduced the impact of the global crisis on the financial sector in particular. The private sector is showing modest recovery from the recession but the public sector will face painful adjustment for years to come. The Canadian federal system responds to macroeconomic shocks with significantly decentralized institutions, especially in fiscal federalism. Canada is recognized by scholars of comparative public finance and federalism to have among the most decentralized set of fiscal relations in the world. Provinces have the constitutional and fiscal means to undertake independent macroeconomic policy, including running budgetary deficits. While the regionally diverse economy in Canada provides the potential rationale for a dysfunctional, uncoordinated intergovernmental response to the recession, up to 2008 the system demonstrated notable cooperation and congruence. Canadians’ normative views about the effectiveness of decentralized fiscal federal regimes have also had a continuing impact on international theory and governance of public finance. This paper hypothesizes that this model remains intact following the ‘great recession’ and that the Canadian fiscal system is still an asset for Canada. However, as in other countries, the federal policy response has purchased short‐term political and economic stability in exchange for longer‐term adjustment. Significant issues to be managed in the medium term include dealing with inevitable cuts in intergovernmental transfer programs, proposed further centralization of financial sector regulation, inter‐regional tensions over resource revenues, and a potential return to conflict over industrial policy.

Monday, 2.30pm, Private Dining Room 1 CAPLING, Ann University of Melbourne RAVENHILL, John The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected] Multilateralising Regionalism: What role for the TPP? The Asia‐Pacific region is home to a large and rapidly growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). These agreements differ widely in design, scope and purpose. Amidst this


increasingly messy situation, the proposed Trans‐Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement stands out for a range of important economic and political reasons, not least of which is its potential to take existing PTAs in the Asia‐Pacific region in a new direction. The aim of the TPP negotiators is to produce a comprehensive, high quality, multi‐party agreement which could help to tame the tangle of PTAs and be a potential stepping stone to achieving the long term Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) goal of liberalizing trade among its member economies. This paper examines the potential for the TPP to achieve the goal of ‘multilateralising regionalism’ in the Asia‐Pacific. It proceeds in four parts. The first provides context to explain the origins of the TPP through a discussion and analysis of PTAs in the Asia‐Pacific region. Part two outlines the economic and political objectives of the TPP, drawing attention to the varying motives and priorities of the key TPP participants. The third part explores the main economic issues associated with the multilateralization of regionalism, especially in respect to the major design features of the TPP. Part four draws attention to the political obstacles to realizing the TPP.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 1 CARROLL, Peter University of Tasmania [email protected] Australia and the Bretton Woods Institutions The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of Australia’s evolving relationships with the IMF and the World Bank. There are two main reasons for examining the relationships with these two institutions. The first is that the relationships have rarely been subject to scholarly examination, despite their persistence over the last sixty years. The second is the importance of the two institutions for Australia’s external relations. In the case of the IMF, for example, Australia has 3.2 billion of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) and 2.5 billion in other currency holdings (largely AUD) held in the IMF’s General Resources Account, sums large enough to warrant an examination. In the case of the World Bank, for example, in 2009–10 Australia provided over $490 million for aid purposes, including a hundred co‐financed projects to a wide range of countries, a substantial part of Australia’s overall aid effort. As it is impossible in one paper to do justice to what has been a sixty‐three year long set of complex and important relationships, only three aspects are examined in any depth. The three examined are: one, the origins of Australia’s involvement, leading up to membership; two, the political implications of Australia’s involvement in, and leadership of, the IMF and World Bank constituencies of which they are members; three, the two‐way flow of influence involved in the relationships. In summary, it is argued that Australia has had long and, for the most part, fruitful relationships with both the IMF and the World Bank, relationships that have survived the changing roles played by both institutions in international economic governance and development. Moreover, Australian representatives at both institutions have, at times, achieved a surprising degree of influence, based largely on the quality of the arguments put forward, which reflects well on both them and the country they represent.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 2 CAUNCE, Thomas University of Adelaide [email protected] The Rudd Government: Strengthening Labor’s social democratic ideology through Keynesian postulates With the Gillard Labor Government having firmly adopted Treasurer Wayne Swan’s dictum that ‘if we are going to be Keynesians in the downturn, we have to be Keynesians on the way


up again’, it is timely to consider what constitutes a Keynesian social democratic policy agenda, beyond simply a commitment to counter‐cyclical fiscal policy. By analysing the economic postulates and policy proposals that John Maynard Keynes himself put forward, it is this paper’s contention that the Rudd Government’s policy agenda constituted a close approximation to this characterisation. Keynes’ recognition of demand factors in resource allocation most famously led him to propose the alleviation of recessionary circumstances through fiscal pump‐priming, which was undoubtedly implemented within Australia and throughout much of the world in response to the recent Global Financial Crisis. However, he also advocated various other measures to precipitate greater demand, notably: a more equitable distribution of resources, proposed to be partially financed through higher corporate tax rates; as well as greater state involvement in capital allocation and in public sector investment. This policy agenda was largely echoed in Kevin Rudd’s consistent rhetorical commitment to repeal neoliberalism to make capitalism more equitable and efficient, and was manifested to varying degrees in his Government’s commitments and proposals, such as those to modestly increase Commonwealth expenditure in health, education, and social security, his Government’s (partial) repeal of Work Choices, the proposed implementation of the Resources Super Profits Tax, and the establishment of the National Broadband Network.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 3 CHAPPELL, Louise University of New South Wales CURTIN, Jennifer University of Auckland [email protected]; [email protected] Does Federalism Matter? The case of domestic/family violence in Australia and New Zealand What effect does federalism have on women’s policy making? Does the presence of multiple levels of government in a single polity open up greater opportunities for policy innovation and policy learning? Or, do such arrangements frustrate efforts to bring about policy reform in areas relating to women’s lives? Do unitary systems allow for more progressive policy‐making or does a centralized system block such initiatives? Through an examination of policy making in the area of family and domestic violence in Australia and New Zealand, the former a federal and the latter a unitary state, we seek to explore these questions and draw some initial findings about the impact of state architecture on gender sensitive policy making.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 1 CHOU, Mark University of Melbourne [email protected] Soft Authoritarianism Meets Inverted Totalitarianism China’s inability or refusal to democratize in recent decades has been a constant source of consternation for the West. Being the world’s largest remaining nation that has resisted democracy’s global spread, it is perceived by many Western powers as an ‘outlaw regime’ potentially at odds with liberal democratic values and US hegemony. But having said that, is it fair to label China and the CCP as a totalitarian monolith that enjoys less and less popular support from the Chinese people? Or have they, contrary to popular beliefs, transformed into an entity altogether different? Just how different, in other words, is the Chinese system of


governance from that of a liberal democratic country like the United States? The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that contemporary Chinese politics is best classified as a form of soft authoritarianism. Understood as the move under a one‐party system towards greater political freedom, accountability and openness, it is, as Kerstein Klein puts it, a regime that is neither fully democratic nor completely repressive. By way of comparison, the paper draws links between the soft authoritarianism taking shape in China today with the brand of inverted totalitarianism that the eminent political thinker Sheldon Wolin has diagnosed of contemporary US democracy. Based on the union between the state and corporate power, Wolin speaks of democracy in the US as having inherent anti‐democratic tendencies at its core. That, as this paper suggests, is what the US shares with its Asian counterpart: a political regime where its leaders, fearful that an ‘anything goes’ mentality would inadequately prepare them for the insidious global threats they face, have habitually curtailed democratic rights in order to safeguard the survival of their state.


CHOWDHURY, Bushra The Australian National University [email protected] Subservient Subalterns: Women in local government in Bangladesh Numbers have always been seen as an important indicator of women’s political strength. Visibility as members of a representative institution by itself was considered to embody political power for women. The issue of strengthening or reinforcing their role as representatives was not seen as crucially important. The much publicized Local Government (Union Parishad) Amendment Act 1997 provided for direct election to more than twelve thousand reserved seats for women at the local level. Women members of Union Parishad (UP) thus became a huge reservoir of potential power, but upon assuming office found the authorities concerned had not thought about how to integrate women’s new found political power with the traditional patriarchal power bases that operated within and affected the environment of political and representative institutions. The present study is based on field work conducted over a period of nine months during 2010–11. The study found that members directly elected on seats reserved for women, were aware of their power and were critical of their male colleagues for denying them access to the powers that they were entitled as members of UP. At the same time they also were subservient to patriarchal domination. They often acquiesced in to the political usurpation of their power by their husbands. Thus structural and cultural factors are responsible for the denuding of women’s actual political strength as members of the UP. Designated as the ‘inner core group’ this group of women had feeble, which at times verged on negative and restrictive, interaction with the population that inhabited the political vicinity designated as ‘outer core group’. The ‘outer core group’ comprised of local stakeholders and interest groups such as officials of the Upazilla Parishad (the next higher level of local government body), local and national NGOs, local elite, imams of local mosques who laid the parameters of women’s political role in society, as shaped by their own location and ideology. The third group of people, those at the outer rung of the socio political hierarchy such as the Election Commission, Members of Parliament (both women and men), women’s movement organisation and other national level actors viewed the ‘inner core group’, through a national lens. A three way interactive channel is thus developed to delineate the pathway of the subalterns and explain their subservient status.



COCKFIELD, Geoff University of Southern Queensland [email protected] The Architectural State This paper is a challenge to the way in which the notion of a 'nanny state' has been used to resist a range of policies aimed at constraining particular behaviours that may have negative social impacts. The critics of 'nannyism' argue for the benefits of individual and rational choice but findings from behavioural economics bring some of the underlying classical liberal assumptions into question. This paper will consider research findings that suggest a tendency for people to carry two, often contradictory sets of preferences—the immediate and the long‐term, here the latter perspective gives greater weight to social good and personal benefit. The argument here is that governments can and do develop policies that encourage the longer view, which is more than just simple nannyism. Example policy issues such as gambling, energy consumption and substance abuse are used to illustrate how governments could design policies that encourage the longer view. The aim here is to propose a role for the architectural state, with the focus on policy design, rather than the nanny state.

Tuesday, 10am, Private Dining Room 2

COFFEY, Brian Deakin University [email protected] Victorian Labor and the Environment: A legacy to be proud of? From October 1999 through to November 2010, Victoria was governed by Australian Labor Party (ALP) led governments. The ALP’s defeat at the November 2010 election provides the opportunity to take stock of their policy achievements in the environmental domain, with a particular focus on how the concept of sustainability was considered in the strategic directions pursued as well as policy and institutional reforms introduced. In assessing their performance, the context within which the ALP governed is considered, an account of the policy trajectory of their three terms in government provided, and the adequacy of this trajectory assessed. While the analysis is focused on Victoria, the lessons drawn may have wider relevance.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 5 COLLIN, Philippa and THID, Amanda University of Western Sydney [email protected]; [email protected] Digitally Enhanced? Youth citizenship in the context of cybersafety policy In recent years, the concept of ‘digital citizenship’ has begun to supplant ‘cybersafety’ as a critical pillar of Australian policy and programs pertaining to young people’s use of online and networked media. By examining policy and programmatic documents this paper critically examines how digital citizenship is conceptualised by both government and non‐government organizations in Australia. Analysis specifically considers how young people and their technology use are framed, and the implications of these discourses for youth citizenship. We argue that, although digital citizenship is a highly contested and under‐theorised concept, its current treatment tends to privilege a top‐down model of ‘managed’ youth e‐citizenship. This is, it is argued, removed from young people’s everyday lived experiences of online and networked media and reinforces discourses of citizenship that de‐value the legitimate


citizenship practices and claims of young people. On the basis of this critique, a way of thinking about digital citizenship that is anchored in everyday lived experience is put forward. The final part of the paper then considers the potential of this conceptualisation in relation to a novel ‘digital dialogue’ experiment set up to explore intergenerational attitudes towards social networking services. This case study demonstrates the importance of a relational notion of citizenship in the context of a digitally‐enabled society.


CONLEY TYLER, Melissa and WILKINSON, Gale Australian Institute of International Affairs [email protected]; [email protected] Public and Citizen Diplomacy in Australia Public and citizen diplomacy are relatively new areas for discussion in Australia. Unlike traditional diplomacy, which concentrates on government‐to‐government interaction, public diplomacy aims to influence the views of foreign publics (government‐to‐public) while citizen diplomacy focuses on the potential of positive citizen‐to‐citizen contact to improve relations between countries (public‐to‐public). Together, they are key tools in building international understanding. In June 2011, the Australian Institute of International Affairs hosted a Forum on Public and Citizen Diplomacy bringing together Australian and international experts, civil society organisations, media and academic experts to discuss the role of public and citizen diplomacy in Australia and abroad. This was the first such event in Australia, and will feed into a planned Global Summit on Citizen Diplomacy and Cultural Engagement being organised by the British Council in 2012. The paper will present the findings and recommendations reached at the Forum on the current challenges and opportunities in public and citizen diplomacy in Australia. This will include discussion of current initiatives, best practices and the role of media compared to international practice. The paper will provide concrete recommendations on how to maintain and augment public and citizen diplomacy, especially through greater coordination and collaboration by people, institutions and governments focused on this area. This paper is proposed as part of a panel on public and citizen diplomacy convened by the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a non‐profit organisation established in 1933 to promote public understanding and interest in international affairs.


CONLEY TYLER, Melissa and ABBASOV, Abbas Australian Institute of International Affairs [email protected]; [email protected] e‐Diplomacy: Lessons and prospects Information and communication technology is disruptive technology. It tends to change the established way of doing things. This paper will focus on the impact of information and communication technology on the practice of diplomacy, particularly on public diplomacy. With the popularisation of new media, social networks and other latest internet‐based tools, diplomacy has moved into a new domain of digital affairs. This paper discusses the current state of e‐diplomacy, defined as use of new ICT tools in order to achieve diplomatic goals. It examines the development of US public diplomacy and digital diplomacy, and the potential for adoption by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to enhance its public diplomacy. This paper is proposed as part of a panel on public and citizen diplomacy convened


by the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a non‐profit organisation established in 1933 to promote public understanding and interest in international affairs.


CONLEY TYLER, Melissa and LONGDEN, Caitlin Australian Institute of International Affairs [email protected]; [email protected] Australia's Role in the G20 As a middle power, Australia is always looking for a seat at the table. The formation of the G20 Leaders’ Summit as a product of the global financial crisis has given Australia the opportunity to participate in discussions at a premier level. This paper will assess the role that Australia has played and is likely to play in the G20. It outlines Australia’s motivations for promoting the elevation of the G20 to its current leader‐level status and assesses Australia’s contribution to the G20 to date. Finally, the paper looks at Australia’s likely role as the G20 matures from providing a ‘crisis response’ to a role as a potential ‘steering committee’ for global economic cooperation. Australia’s experience will be compared and contrasted with the experience of other ‘middle powers’. Material will be drawn from existing literature, interviews with three government departments and comparative material.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 2 CONLEY TYLER, Melissa Australian Institute of International Affairs BLIZZARD, Emily The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected] The Under‐Representation of Women in Australia’s International Affairs Despite two decades of anti‐discrimination laws, women continue to be under‐represented at senior levels in Australia’s international affairs. This paper looks at possible explanations for this under‐representation and possible responses. The explanations for women’s continuing under‐representation at senior levels are interrelated and include the legacy of direct discrimination, continued indirect discrimination, family responsibilities and socially constructed notions of gender. Together, these combine to form barriers to women’s participation and advancement to senior levels in Australia’s international affairs. The paper will draw on examples of women who have overcome these barriers and achieved senior positions in their field. Examples such as diplomat Her Excellency Penny Wensley AO, academic Professor Emeritus Helen Hughes AO and lawyer Justice Elizabeth Evatt AO show the potential of a number of strategies including: seeking out supportive professional mentors and environments; strategic career planning; activism in bringing about change for women in the workforce; a resilient personal approach; and a strong passion for and commitment to a career in international affairs. The strategies implemented by these women provide valuable insights on potential measures that may assist in removing barriers to women’s advancement in the field. The implementation of these measures would present substantial benefits, not just for women, but also for Australia’s national interest in being able to call upon its most talented individuals—regardless of gender—to pursue its interests in international affairs.



COSTA, Monica and SHARP, Rhonda University of South Australia SAWER, Marian The Australian National University [email protected] [email protected]; [email protected]; Women Acting for Women: The case of gender‐responsive public finance in Timor‐Leste In Timor‐Leste women constitute close to 30 per cent of the legislature, a relatively high figure in the world and in the region. But to what extent has the presence of women in parliament contributed to progress towards gender equality? In other words, has descriptive representation of women led to substantive representation? In this paper we argue that the passage of a parliamentary resolution on gender‐responsive budgeting in Timor‐Leste was an act of substantive representation and we use a range of data to examine what made this act possible. Beyond the number of women elected, the development of gender‐focused parliamentary institutions such as a cross‐party women¹s caucus was crucial to the victory of the resolution. We contribute to the relatively small literature on such gender‐focused parliamentary institutions and their role in supporting critical actors and enabling critical acts. We suggest there was a Œcritical juncture¹, whereby new institutions were being created in a new country at a time when international agencies and donors were conduits for norms of gender equality. Characteristics of the women¹s movement that enabled it to speak with a united voice were also important, as were networks between the women¹s movement, women¹s machinery in government, and critical actors in parliament and the executive.

Tuesday, 10am, Private Dining Room 1 COWDEN, Mhairi The Australian National University [email protected] 'No Harm, No Foul' Australian Children's Right to Know their Genetic Parents Many countries, including Australia, have legislated against anonymous gamete donation. A recent Australian Senate inquiry has reinforced this position and has supported non‐anonymous donation grounded in a child's right to know their genetic parents. This paper will consider the main reasons for the existence of such a right and argue that first it must be shown that there exists a right to know the nature of one's conception before a right to information regarding one's donor can be properly respected. We must show that the principle of 'no harm, no foul' is false in the case of non‐disclosure of a child’s genetic origins. This is imperative to guide Australian legislation regulating and protecting a child's right to know their genetic parents. If ‘no harm, no foul’ does not hold, then the Australian state will hold obligations not only to allow access to identifying information regarding a child’s donor, but also enable or ensure disclosure regarding the nature of a child’s conception in the first place.

Tuesday, 2pm, Private Dining Room 2 CROWDER, George Flinders University [email protected] Berlin and Rawls Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls have been coupled together by the late GA Cohen as ‘the most celebrated twentieth century Anglophone political philosophers’. In this paper I compare them, looking for points of overlap and conflict, and trying to reach an overall assessment of


their relative merits. My general view is that Rawls is clearly the more careful and thorough philosopher, but also that Berlin bequeaths to us lines of thought that are just as fruitful and persuasive as those left to us by Rawls, if not more so. In particular, I argue that Rawls is more of a pluralist than a monist in Berlin’s terms, but that his view falls short of the fuller appreciation of the plurality of values that is found in Berlin and others. Further, contrary to some Rawlsian thinkers, Berlin’s pluralist liberalism is no more controversial than Rawls’s political liberalism, and has an advantage in its attitude to truth.

Wednesday, 11am, Private Dining Room 2 CROZIER, Michael and LITTLE, Adrian University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected] Democratic Voice: Popular sovereignty in conditions of pluralization This paper examines the shifting character of democratic expression in contemporary democratic polities. Increasing societal pluralization along with the growing professionalization of political elites poses significant challenges to prevailing models of representative democracy. Key questions arise about the status of popular sovereignty as traditional conduits of democratic voice struggle to register and mediate new and highly differentiated interests, values and demands. The paper problematizes this issue simultaneously as a conceptual reformulation of democratic theory and as an analytical investigation of the reorientation political practice. The immediate aftermath of the recent Australian federal election is used to illustrate key dimensions of this problematic.


CROZIER, Michael University of Melbourne [email protected] David Easton’s Systems Analysis and The New Communications Ecology This paper investigates what insight David Easton’s political systems analysis may offer into shifts in contemporary political life. Easton’s approach is essentially concerned with how a political system persists in the context of stability and change. The analytical emphasis is on the system’s behaviour regarding incoming demands and support, and the effects of these inputs as political outputs. This behaviour has consequences within a political system for the system itself and not just for its environment. The looping of inputs with outputs enables us to investigate how a system copes in a dynamic manner with the challenges of environmental stimuli. Systemic feedback flows from the system as a whole and may return through the system, dispersing its effects in the system. Easton describes his approach as a flow model of the political system in which political processes are understood as continuous and interlinked flows of behaviour. This presents the political system as a communication system with a capacity to adapt and evolve. This paper will examine key dimensions of Easton’s political systems approach and will consider their analytical efficacy in the face of newly‐emerging communications ecology.



CURCHIN, Katherine The Australian National University [email protected] Testing the Limits of the Politics of Recognition: Foxhunters in the United Kingdom When political theorists discuss the rights of minority groups to preserve their culture and identity, the cases they usually examine concern indigenous peoples or other politically and economically disadvantaged groups. By contrast in this paper I seek to extend the discussion on the persuasiveness of appeals to culture and identity by exploring the use of the language of culture by a relatively powerful and affluent group, British foxhunters. I examine the arguments about identity and cultural survival used to defend the sport of foxhunting in the United Kingdom in the lead up to the creation of the Hunting Act (2004). Though these arguments self‐consciously echo those made by indigenous hunters, they had little persuasive force. No animal rights activists confessed themselves torn between the rights of foxes and the rights of foxhunters to preserve their centuries‐old culture. Moreover, the House of Lords held that the hunting ban did not constitute discrimination or violate anyone’s human rights even as it acknowledged the importance of hunting to some people’s identity and way of life. Against Charles Taylor, who claims that cultural recognition is ‘a vital human need’, I argue that cultural recognition is important for those who have suffered domination in a way that it is not important for more privileged groups. Much of the moral force of appeals to culture derive not from the importance of cultural recognition per se, but from the imperative of redressing long‐standing patterns of social, economic and political disadvantage.


DAVIS, Fergal University of New South Wales [email protected] ‘I Saw Two Shooting Stars Last Night’: Caution against wishing for constitutional reform of the UK Royal Prerogative It had been assumed since the late 1980’s that the UK was marching slowly, but definitively, towards electoral reform. It was further assumed that such reform would predicate a review of the prerogative powers of the UK monarch. Although electoral reform has been decisively rejected the desire to formalize the powers of the Crown remains. This paper will argue against that imperative. The ongoing trend to reform in this area can be seen in the Fixed‐term Parliament Bill but is also visible in the work of the UK Cabinet Office in May 2010. This attempted to codify the prerogative rules in the event of a hung parliament so as to avoid the monarch becoming embroiled in political controversy. However, formalization does not remove the potential for controversy—as a review of other common law jurisdictions demonstrates. In 1963 the Privy Council upheld the right of the Governor General of Western Nigeria to accept a mere letter from members of parliament as evidence that the prime minister had lost confidence. A vote in Parliament was unavailable because Parliament was prorogued. This precedent is set alongside the recent Canadian prorogation crisis to demonstrate the potential for significant political tempest with or without formal rules. The Whitlam affair and more recent Tasmanian experience reiterate the point. The UK Cabinet office advice to the monarch in May 2010 attempted to reduce the potential for political controversy—but choosing a government where the people have failed to do so is political controversial. The Fixed‐term Parliament Bill seeks to reduce the power of the incumbent government to determine the date of an election—but it also reduces the power of the Parliament. Ultimately, rather than ameliorating the potential for political controversy we ought to step back from piecemeal constitutional reform. Bagehot argued that, after King


William IV, no UK monarch would take the politically contentious decision to remove a government which had the confidence of parliament because to do so risked undermining the institution of the monarchy itself. So, we should not immunize the Crown from moments of constitutional discomfort; we should acknowledge its constitutional function.


DAVIS, Thomas and GALLIGAN, Brian University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected] ‘Normalising’ Human Rights in Asia: The problematic ASEAN intergovernmental commission on human rights The UN and many Western human rights advocates argue that the international human rights regime is spreading into Asia. They see this as resulting from a process of ‘norm socialisation’ that is driven by the UN and other international organisations, NGOs, and sovereign state actors. As an example of the inexorable progress of this rights ‘normalisation’ they point to the establishment of the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR) in October 2009. The product of extensive negotiation between ASEAN members, this was seen as a significant departure from the opposition to international human rights legislation and norms that had previously marked the region, and which found expression through the ‘Asian values’ debate. This paper explores the degree to which the AICHR has fulfilled these expectations in the first eighteen months to two years of its existence. Drawing on a combination of documentary material and interviews, the authors find that there remains significant, if uneven, ASEAN member resistance to the protection and promotion of human rights via the AICHR. This resistance is manifested not only in the limited terms of reference to which the AICHR works, but also in the governance and management delays and under‐resourcing that have bedevilled the setting up of the Commission’s procedures and secretariat. The paper concludes with a critical analysis of key rights normalisation theories in light of the current failure of the AICHR to begin its operation in any meaningful way.

Wednesday, 9am, Private Dining Room 1 DI PIRAMO, Daniela Griffith University [email protected] I Remember You Well: The politics of symbolic recognition in Latin America The success of charismatic or populist leadership in Latin America is often tied to the national cultural and historical context within which these leaders perform. Typically a connection is made between a contemporary political figure and a meaningful myth, sacred figure, symbol or national hero from the past. Through a mingling of fact and fiction, history is made to seem to repeat itself, the familiarity of the past ameliorating the uncertainty of the future. It is established wisdom that the ability of populist or charismatic leaders to revitalise the symbolic realm is crucial to their political legitimacy as these connections are embedded in the popular imaginary. In this paper, I suggest that these associations have not been sufficiently conceptualised in political theory, as they are found mostly in the realm of cultural studies. In order to address this vacuum the concept of ‘symbolic recognition’ is introduced with reference to Hugo Chávez and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. I comment on the element of political strategy that characterises this type of popular memory, also noting the


precariousness of the legitimacy it confers, as leaders must make their own contribution to the symbolic order of the present.

Monday, 11.30am, House of Representatives Room 1 DOWDING, Keith The Australian National University [email protected] Turning Power Debates into Positive Sum Games The paper argues that theoretical terms such as ‘power’ should not be conceptualized in a vacuum but must be conceptualized within frameworks directed to specific research questions. Thus debates over whether power is zero‐sum or positive sum; or whether power is something exercised by one agent against the interests of another or can be used to enhance another’s interests; or whether power can be reduced to other terms such as ‘domination’ or juxtaposed to terms such as ‘authority’ in themselves are of little utility to social science or social theory. They serve simply as academic point scoring zero sum games. Most theoretical terms receive purchase within a framework when they fulfil a role that helps explain or understand social situations relevant to specific research questions. A term such as ‘power’ generates controversy over its use because it is so normatively loaded. However, whilst we should not scorn or spurn the rhetorical normative force of terms such as ‘power’, neither should we allow that fact to dominate our analyses. There is little social utility in having pointless theoretical battles over the ‘correct’ usage of theoretical terms when, without serious misunderstanding, they can be used in very different ways within different theoretical frameworks addressing very different theoretical or empirical questions.

Tuesday, 4pm, Private Dining Room 2 DREW, Brendan University of Adelaide [email protected] A Culture of Silence: Designing a questionnaire to accommodate the Thai taboo on publicly talking about sex Despite Thai youths accounting for almost half of Thailand’s new HIV infections, this vulnerable group of Thai society tends to be overlooked in contemporary HIV/AIDS literature. Given traditional Thai social/sexual norms deny the existence of non‐commercial pre‐marital sex in Thailand there is a strong taboo on public discourse which suggests such behaviour does occur. This cultural barrier makes investigating this vulnerable group from a safer sex perspective highly problematic. However, this paper will demonstrate that by using culturally appropriate investigative measures that accommodate rather than ignore this taboo, it is possible to investigate this vulnerable group of Thai society and address a large gap in the HIV/AIDS literature. By employing a qualitative study in Thailand that recruited participants through peer‐based networks and used investigate tools designed to replicate peer‐based discourse, including the use of vignette scenarios I was able to accommodate this taboo on public discourse. The result was a highly informative ‘snap‐shot’ of contemporary Thai culture that illustrated the social/sexual issues that are of most concern to Thai youths in relation to safer sex.



DUNCOMBE, Constance University of Queensland [email protected] The Twitter Revolution? Social media, representation and crisis in Iran and Libya The emergence of information communication technology (ICT) such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and weblogs as social media networks is an issue that has gained greater prominence within academic literature in recent years. The use of ICT for social engagement and information dispersal during times of conflict is an area that is continually growing both in breadth and depth. Despite the increasing awareness of the role ICT has to play in the reporting of conflict, particularly when more traditional sources of media are unable or extremely limited in providing in‐depth coverage of the situation at hand, there seems to be little appreciation, if at all, of how processes of representation and identity articulation feed into the intersubjective engagement of Western media with non‐Western ICT use. In delving into the use of non‐Western ICTs by Western media outlets, a space for understanding emerges in relation to determining how schemas of cultural representations continue to act to maintain the hegemonic power discourse of the enlightened West/Self and the subordinate non‐West Other. An examination of the coverage of the various events surrounding the 2010 Green Movement protests in Iran and the 2011 anti‐Gaddafi uprising in Libya in this paper will hopefully offer a more substantial conception of how these schemas of cultural representation are still evident within a medium that is supposedly egalitarian and defined in simplest terms as ‘a young woman or young man with a smartphone'.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 2 ECKERSLEY, Robyn University of Melbourne [email protected] Does Climate Leadership Matter? The language of leaders and laggards has been routinely invoked to judge comparative state performance in international climate diplomacy and national climate policy. Yet the scholarly debates about what makes a leader, whether states can be leaders, what evidence counts as leadership, and whether leadership makes a difference, are much less clear cut. The European Union (EU) is widely recognised as a climate leader but it appears to have had declining influence in the international negotiations and arguably the national climate policies of other states since 2007. In contrast, the US is widely recognised as a climate laggard, yet it has played an increasingly influential role in shaping the post‐Kyoto climate negotiations. This paper critically reviews competing understandings of state leadership within International Relations theory, foreign policy making and comparative politics and defends a constructivist understanding of leadership that is capable of straddling these three fields of inquiry and accounting for the role of both the EU and the US.


EMERSON, Guy The Australian National University [email protected] Promoting ‘American’ Democracy: Challenges to US democracy promotion in Latin America Dating from the Reagan presidency’s ‘crusade for freedom’, democracy promotion has been a central pillar of US foreign policy. Whether claims by George HW Bush that ‘beyond


containment lies democracy’, or by George W Bush that intervention in the Middle East promoted ‘the democratization or the march of freedom in the Muslim world’, the importance of democracy to US policy cannot be underestimated. Far from promoting democracy, however, critics suggest that it is merely rhetorical cover for intervention and control, thus serving foreign rather than local interests. While not discarding these insights, this paper suggests that while democracy promotion may support US self‐interests, so too does it uphold a US self‐image by acting as the principle ideal around which Washington constructs its identity and worldview. Explored in relation to the Americas, it is argued that representations of an authoritarian Venezuela are central to both a U.S‐authored Latin American identity and, in contrast, integral to challenging it. While Venezuela acts as the reverse image of freedom‐loving United States and a democratically abiding Latin America, it also demonstrates how democracy itself is increasingly a site of contestation. Consequently, Venezuela disrupts US practices of identity and thereby questions the legitimacy of democracy promotion.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 1

EVANS, Julie and MCMILLAN, Nesam University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected] Moving On? An interdisciplinary analysis of official responses to structural injustice This paper is part of a broader research project that critically reflects on official responses to reports of suffering and injustice experienced by colonised or formerly colonised peoples across space and time. Whereas the existing literature on official responses to reports of mass suffering often confines itself to particular national, disciplinary, or contemporary boundaries, this project adopts an interdisciplinary, comparative and historical approach. In highlighting the tendency of transitional and international justice scholarship to focus on contemporary political violence—and, accordingly, its failure to adequately account for past colonial harm—the approach draws attention to the persistence of structural injustice in the present, despite official attempts at redress and reform. We suggest that such an elaborated conceptual framework is needed in order to more fully grasp the overarching and comprehensive effects of colonialism, whose impact is inadequately recognised in official responses, both in the past and in the present. This paper draws on this conceptual framework to examine official reactions to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion and the 1994 Rwandan genocide. We place historical and contemporary commissions of inquiry alongside each other in order to interrogate official responses to suffering that are aimed at ‘moving on’ without necessarily addressing the structural causes and legacies of personalised suffering.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 3 FAWCETT, Paul University of Sydney [email protected] The Core Executive in New South Wales (1995–2011) Central agencies play a crucial role in government but whether they have the capacity to be able to deliver what is asked of them in an era of governance is a question that is currently being asked by both academics and practitioners. This paper addresses these issues by using the core executive thesis to examine the role of central agencies in NSW since 1995. In doing so, it uses documentary analysis and elite semi‐structured interviews to evaluate how the capacity of central agencies in NSW changed over the course of the Labor government and why. More specifically, it examines: the decision making process in central agencies, including


the role of cabinet; institutional reforms to central agencies and their impact; and the role of strategic policy advice and coordination between central agencies and government departments.


FAWCETT, Paul University of Sydney MARSH, David The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected] Historical Institutionalism and Critical Realism New institutionalism has been something of a growth industry in Political Science in the last two decades and a number of classificatory schema have been developed to categorise its sub‐types. Historical institutionalism features in almost all of these categorisations. However, whilst it is widely accepted that historical intuitionalism is a facet of ‘new institutionalism’, its distinctiveness and coherence has been open to dispute, particularly amongst those that have sought to develop an alternative approach known as constructivist institutionalism. In this paper, we argue against the need for another new institutionalism and propose that many of the key criticisms raised by the constructivist institutionalist school can be better accommodated within a form of historical institutionalism underpinned by a critical realist epistemology. We develop this argument over three sections: in the first section, we argue that the majority of the existing literature on historical institutionalism makes too many concessions to rational choice theory, the dominant analytical approach in American political science; in the second section, we critically examine constructivist institutionalism, which has positioned itself as an alternative form of new institutionalism that, unlike its alternatives, takes the role of ideas seriously; in the final section, we outline, in further detail, how a form of historical institutionalism underpinned by a critical realist epistemology can address these criticisms and others.


FENNA, Alan and TAPPER, Alan Curtin University [email protected]; [email protected] Crisis, Uncertainty, and the Australian Welfare State A number of leading social policy scholars have argued that changes over the last three decades mean that it is ‘farewell to the Australia Welfare State’. ‘The welfare state has been dead for some time, certainly in Australia', argues Jamrozik. At the other extreme, it is still claimed that no welfare state in the world delivers a bigger bang for the buck and does a better job of reducing inequality than Australia’s. Given the budgetary significance of social policy, its potential impact on individual and collective welfare, and its perennially controversial nature, some attempt to reconcile such divergent views is certainly called for. This paper undertakes such a task by examining patterns of social spending and design of social programs in Australia.



FENNA, Alan Curtin University [email protected] Feminism and Federalism: Analytic considerations This paper explore some of the main analytic issues that must be resolved if we are to think clearly about the relationship between feminism and federalism and establish meaningful comparisons between different experiences. In doing so, it considers the following definitional, conceptual, methodological and theoretical aspects to the problem: how we construe feminism as a dependent variable or set of dependent variables in respect to both the range of activities it encompasses and the existence of cognate variables; the nature of federalism and its relationship to the broader phenomenon of multi‐level governance; the conceptualisation of institutions as distinct elements of the political system; the distinction and relationship between federalism and other institutional variables such as forms of parliamentary or presidential government; theoretical propositions about the possible causal relationships between institutional and non‐institutional variables; and the extent to which the comparative method can be deployed to develop valid generalisations from the diverse experiences of the small number of federal cases available.


FERGUSON, Peter University of Melbourne [email protected] Transcending the Growth Imperative: Ecological modernisation and beyond In light of the social and ecological costs of, and limits to, economic growth, this paper begins by developing a structural explanation for the unwavering commitment of most policymakers to the pursuit of growth. The potential for ecological modernisation to overcome this growth imperative is then explored. It is concluded that the prospects for this are uncertain at best, as ecological modernisation neither explicitly problematises economic growth, nor offers any definitive alternatives to growth strategies. Instead, a range of substantive measures to promote greater economic and social equality are needed to lessen the growth imperative. Reforms to the labour market will also be required to guarantee full employment and that productivity gains are translated into shorter working hours rather than increased net production.


GALLIGAN, Brian, BOESE, Martina, PHILLIPS, Melissa and KEARTON, Annika The University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected]; VMR‐[email protected]; [email protected] Boosting Regional Settlement of Migrants and Refugees in Australia: Policy initiatives and challenges Regional settlement of skilled and humanitarian migrants is an important migration trend, which all levels of government in Australia are increasingly promoting. It has the potential to address population decline, meet industry needs and provide a suitable lifestyle outside metropolitan areas. With a multitude of actors involved, including government, third sector


organisations, community groups and employers, an in‐depth analysis of how settlement is working in different locations in Victoria reveals the complexity and weaknesses in the current intergovernmental coordination and assistance to regional settlement. These include the highly centralized character of settlement planning in Australia, the lack of opportunities for policy input from local stakeholders at the coalface of settlement assistance and the piece‐meal nature of funding for settlement assistance. Based on the analysis of focus groups with local stakeholders in six regional and rural locations in Victoria, this paper identifies and assesses the complex, top‐down arrangements in place, and the gaps and the range of bottom‐up responses from local government, the business and community sector. It explores the scope for improving regional settlement policy and practice.


GARNIER, Adele Macquarie University [email protected] Institutional Complexity and Unintended Policy Outcomes: Australian and British asylum policies since the 1990s In the last two decades, the failure of governments across the world to come to terms with the unpredictability of asylum migration has been politically highly salient; asylum appears to have become a policy field in a recurring state of crisis at the global level. However, scholarship attempting to explain this development remains limited. My paper is a contribution to explanatory literature and comparatively investigates unintended outcomes in Australian and British asylum policies since the early 1990s. In spite of highly dissimilar immigration histories, Australia and Britain have over this period followed a similar trajectory in the field of asylum. In the face of rising numbers of asylum claims, successive Australian and British governments have pursued strategies of institutional innovation within and beyond their territories intending to restrict the arrival and settlement of ‘non‐genuine’ humanitarian migrants. Rather than resulting in a sustainable decline of asylum claims, this policy path has fostered an increase of irregular asylum migration as well as the polarisation of public opinion in both countries as regards to asylum. To explain this puzzle, the paper draws on institutionalist literature approaching institutional change as gradual and ‘disjointed’. It assesses to what extent, and under what conditions, the progressive accumulation of layers of institutional reforms over time repeatedly transforming the asylum procedure has contributed to unintended policy outcomes. Empirically, the paper is based on document analysis (statistics, parliamentary debates, administrative and non‐governmental policy reports, opinion polls) and interviews conducted with policy actors in Australia, London and Geneva between 2007 and 2009 as part of my doctoral research.


GHOBADZADEH, Naser University of Sydney [email protected] Religious Secularity: An emerging backlash to the Islamic State of Iran The resurgence of religion as an influential socio‐political element poses a serious challenge to the secularisation thesis. This resurgence not only involves different religions and regions but also encompasses various forms of religion’s engagement in politics. In direct conflict with secularism, it has led to the establishment of an Islamic state in countries including Iran,


Afghanistan and the Sudan. In others, eg, Turkey and the US, religion has increasingly come to be an influential component of secular politics. Diversity, in the form of religion’s engagement with politics, engenders a theoretical shift by questioning the dominant notion of the dichotomy between religion and secularism. Iran occupies a prominent place in both theoretical shifts. The 1979 revolution, which put an end to the top‐down secularisation program, pioneered an Islamic resurgence, thereby disqualifying the secularisation thesis within the Muslim world. Today, a group of religious scholars disillusioned by the lived experience of the Islamic state, is reconceptualising state‐religion relations in which the possibility of the co‐existence of Islam and secularity is proposed. Nader Hashemi contends that the Anglo‐American secularisation process resulted from religious reformation debate, which inspired Locke to articulate his notion of modern liberal democracy. Inspired by Hashemi's conceptual framework, this paper argues that a newly emerging religious reformation discourse in Iran promotes institutional separation of state and religion from an Islamic standpoint. To this end, the thought of key religious scholars, eg, Soroush, Kadivar, Mojtahed‐Shabestari and Ayatollah Montazeri is investigated. Similar to Abd Allah Na`im, these scholars advocate the separation of religion from the institution of state but not from politics. Religious stimulation is the distinguishing feature of their argument for separation. Unlike the prevailing mood of secularisation, emancipating religion from politics is the main concern of this articulation of secularism. Rather than being political theorists, advocates of this secularity are religious scholars. Their articulation is not only engendered by religious concerns: religious methods and Islamic sources such as the Quran and the Hadith are also employed to articulate the necessity of separation of religion from state. In contrast to the pre‐revolutionary, anti‐religious secularisation model, in this conceptualisation, the religion‐secularity relationship is not antithetical. This emerging discourse thus contributes to a theoretical shifting away from the religion‐secularism dichotomy. It is worth mentioning that this discourse is not confined to theoretical debate: the current Green Movement (2009 onwards) is, in many respects, a manifestation of this particular scholarly discourse.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 4 GIL, Laura [email protected] Back to the World: Colombia in United Nations‐authorized peace operations In August 2008, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, then Minister of Defense, announced that Colombia will begin sending police staff and military contingents to international peace operations. He added that a military contingent of about 100 men would soon join the Spanish battalion in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and several dozen policemen were receiving training to leave for the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Historically, Colombia has not been an active participant in multilateral peacekeeping. Aside from a battalion in the Sinai with the Multinational Force Organization, the constraints of its own internal conflict kept the country from involving itself in peacekeeping efforts. Now, Colombia may be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. A peace process with extreme‐right paramilitary groups led to the demobilization of about 30,000 combatants, and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other smaller guerrillas have been weakened. Whether the country is pacified through a military victory or through a peace agreement, to many the end is near. It is time to think about the post‐conflict period. The paper firstly analyzes the benefits and costs of Colombia becoming a troop‐ and police contributing country both from Colombian and United Nations perspectives. It then examines the challenges ahead, formulates policy recommendations, and argues the need for a national policy related to peacekeeping. Even if


the end of the conflict were postponed by years or even decades, this paper concludes that joining the multilateral peacekeeping system could only bring benefits to Colombia and the peacekeeping world.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 1 GILLING, Ana Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] Who are Women Representing When They Claim to be Representing Women? The views of women Parliamentarians Both politicians and political scientists generally accept Anne Phillips’ notion of a ‘politics of presence’—the idea of a close relationship between descriptive and substantive political representation of particular groups. In the case of women, Phillips argues that women constitute a group with unique political identities and interests that are distinct from, and perhaps may even conflict with those of men, and thus women need to be present in legislatures. Anna Yeatman notes this unique political identity—a different way of seeing, doing and being political—cannot be easily identified by scientific formula, or explained by social or political theory. This paper asks, ‘Who are women representing when they claim to be representing women? The views of women Parliamentarians’. Drawing on interviews with 25 senior women politicians in New Zealand, this paper outlines the struggles of women MPs to represent ‘women’ and ‘women’s interests’ in a way that incorporates the complexity of women’s lives and the intersectionality of gender and class, ethnicity, age, life stage and geography, and yet resists essentialising women voters. This paper will draw sharp distinctions between women MPs and feminist MPs, noting that for the former, women and women’s interests can be articulated within a policy agenda, while for the latter, the representation of women is an issue of power and powerlessness which can only be articulated by women who share this standpoint.

Tuesday, 10am, Private Dining Room 1 GLEESON, Kate Macquarie University [email protected] Abortion and ‘Choice’ in the Neoliberal Aftermath ‘Choice’ is a ‘key concept’ in feminist thought that has been coopted by neoliberal ideology. What does this development mean for a continued feminist imagining and strategic deployment of ‘choice’, in regard to abortion in particular? In this article I examine the limitations of ‘choice’ for feminists in a neoliberal polity, especially since the concept has been coopted by conservative politics, in the Australian context. I explain how the feminist concept, deployed relatively successfully to argue for abortion in Australia in the 1970s, came to inform contemporary conservative neoliberal politics—especially antiabortion arguments which rely, perversely, on the myth of a now redundant feminism. I argue that the apparent (superficial) fusion of feminist and neoliberal values has (in part) backed the feminist argument for choice into a conceptual corner. Despite, or because of, feminist success in promoting ‘choice’ as a public good, to the extent of securing sustained public subsidies for abortion services, conservative politics has since commandeered 'choice' as its own, thereby leaving little space for the feminist articulation of its value. In this context, I examine Australian ‘post feminist’


treatments of abortion and choice that, I argue, are inadequate and fail to resist neoliberal hegemony.

Monday, 2.30pm, Members Dining Room 1 GRANT, Bligh and DOLLERY, Brian University of New England [email protected]; [email protected] Regrets? He’s had a Few: Implications of Gerry Stoker’s (2011) Revisionism for Australian Local Government Reform Gerry Stoker has been at the centre of the local government reform debate in Britain for a period of almost thirty years. Perhaps his most significant contribution has been the theory of ‘Networked Community Governance’ which has rested behind policy development and which he augmented with an interpretation of Mark Moore’s theory of public value to the local government milieu. These ideas have received significant attention and gained traction in Australian local government reform processes. However, on the eve of the introduction of the British Coalition Government’s Localism Bill (2010), Stoker claimed that ‘offering to be a place shaper or community governor places local government on a slippery slope to the sidelines of governing arrangements’. After providing a synoptic account of Stoker’s work and its relationship with local government reform in England and how these have resonated in Australia, this paper explores this volte face and its implications for Australian local government reform as an element to Australian democracy.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 3 GRAYCAR, Adam The Australian National University [email protected] Corruption and Government: From state capture to municipal malfeasance Corruption occurs in all spheres of politics and is a very dynamic activity. This paper outlines some of the contexts that promote corruption or allow it to flourish. With examples from different settings it suggests a framework for the study and analysis of different types of corruption.

Wednesday, 9am, Secretariat GRIGGS, Matthew University of Canberra [email protected] Defending Minority Rights in Ethnic Nation States: Does the prospect of democratic nationalism pose a threat to the minority Uzbek population of Kyrgyzstan? This paper argues that contextualisation of ethnic nationalism through democratic channels allows the state to enforce the will of the people at the expense of individual groups within that society. In June of 2010, Kyrgyzstan experienced some of the most bloody ethnic violence in its history. This violence formed the backdrop for the country’s most democratic elections since independence. With the country experiencing rising nationalist discontent, the outcome of this election would set the path of Kyrgyzstan’s democratic future and with it, determine the fate of the Uzbek minority. Kyrgyzstan’s brief democratic history has included two leaders—initially democratically elected—who went on to become increasingly autocratic.


Both leaders were later dismissed as a result of violent uprisings of the people. The two leaders differed in their level of commitment to the nationalist cause and thus offer an intriguing case study from which we can critically evaluate the potential threat that a nationalist leader poses to minority groups. The democratic franchise is often promoted by Western interests as a way of establishing peace and stability. Recent history, however, has demonstrated that in many cases democracy has failed to deliver on its promises. The proliferation of ethnically based nation states has resulted in many instances of marginalisation of minority groups. Minority groups may even be seen as a threat to the very existence of such nation states. In this paper, the ethnic bias of this form of structural democracy is critically evaluated by using Kyrgyzstan’s recent political history as a case study. The deficiencies of this form of majoritarian democracy in comparison to liberal democracies is established by analysing whether the liberties of individuals are being infringed in favour of the will of the people. With support from the international community Kyrgyzstan has embarked upon a path of enhancing democratic institutions through constitutional reform, in an attempt to establish a culture of liberalism among its citizens. This paper further explores how the new democracy of Kyrgyzstan is seeking to overcome the threat of nationalism on its journey towards a liberal democracy.

Wednesday, 9am, Private Dining Room 1 GUNSTONE, Andrew Monash University [email protected] The Establishment of the 1991‐2000 Australian Reconciliation Process In 1991, the Australian Commonwealth Parliament unanimously passed the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act 1991. This Act implemented a ten‐year reconciliation process that aimed to reconcile Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Australians by the end of 2000. The process had three goals: to educate the Australian community about reconciliation and Indigenous issues; to foster a national commitment to address Indigenous socio‐economic disadvantage; and to investigate the desirability of developing a document of reconciliation, and if considered desirable, advise on the content of a document. However, neither the aim nor the three goals were achieved by the end of the ten‐year process. In this paper, I argue that one of the main factors that contributed to the failure of the process to achieve its aim and goals was the manner of the establishment of the reconciliation process in 1991. I examine a number of issues related to the establishment of the process, including the failure of the Hawke Government to implement national land rights and a treaty, the focus on ‘distributive justice’ rather than also on ‘reparative justice’ and the failure of the Hawke Government to genuinely negotiate with Indigenous peoples concerning the reconciliation process. I argue that these, and other issues, contributed to the failure of the ten‐year reconciliation process to achieve its aim and goals.


HALUPKA, Max and STAR, Cassandra Flinders University [email protected]; [email protected] The Utilisation of Direct Democracy and Meritocracy in the Decision Making Process of the Decentralised Virtual Community Anonymous This paper will investigate the utilisation of direct democracy within the decentralised virtual community Anonymous, and in particular, their ability to function as a coherent political actor while adhering to their self enforced anonymity based persona. Anonymous is best understood


as a virtual embodiment of the hacker ethos; orchestrating activist based operations which adhere to their internal majority opinion. Recently, Anonymous has been involved in providing support for the Middle Eastern democracy protests and orchestrating attacks on HBGary Federal and Sony Corporation. We argue that meritocracy and direct democracy form the base for their decision making process. This, in itself, derives from their unique community characteristics which draw upon an anti‐individualistic ideology. Anonymous functions as a leaderless ‘hive mind’, devoid of personal philosophy eschewing any individualisation or emergence of leadership or personality. Anonymous is able to identify insider status within the community through reference to individual knowledge of a collective cultural capital. Esoteric memes comprise the fundamental cultural formation of the group, and, as such, a detailed knowledge of these allows for inter‐community communication. Anonymous employs aspects of meritocracy in formulating collective decisions. With all members utilising the same user‐name, individualism is nonexistent. As such, the merit of an argument is based solely on its content as opposed to a pre‐constructed perception of the individual and their perceived history or standing in the group. Furthermore, an individual’s mastery of the group’s culture denotes their involvement within the community and the level of their understanding in relation to its founding ideology. From this basis, and utilising aspects of direct democracy, Anonymous is able to orchestrate large scale activist operations; coinciding with the current membership’s majority outlook. In this sense, Anonymous has no definitive political, philosophical, theological or sociological preference as the group’s membership is in a constant state of flux. For these reasons, the paper argues that Anonymous, while utilising direct democracy in the decision making process, also employs aspects of meritocracy in judging the relevance, validity and worth of individual postings and contributions to their debates on upcoming actions and campaigns. Therefore, this paper provides a contribution to greater understanding of decentralised virtual community decision‐making processes amongst activist organisations.


HALVORSON, Dan Griffith University [email protected] A Question of Order: Prestige, status‐quo powers and intervention in the periphery The prestige motive in international relations is assumed to apply specifically to great power rivalries, particularly in driving the behaviour of revisionist states. This paper holds that prestige is also a crucial factor in the relationship between status‐quo powers and weak, disorderly states in peripheral areas. The paper’s central argument is that the prestige motive has not been afforded sufficient importance in explaining interventions in the periphery, whereas the evidence examined here suggests it is an integral factor. This argument is demonstrated via three examples of intervention by status‐quo Western powers in different international orders: the 1882 British occupation of Egypt, the 1965 US combat intervention in Vietnam and Australia’s 2003 intervention in Solomon Islands.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 1 HANLEY, Natalia and ROSS, Stuart University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected] Mental Illness in Policy Discourse: Locating the criminal justice system The Commonwealth Government of Australia has launched a strategic document in the budget plan 2011–12 to improve mental health and health services in Australia. The document,


‘Delivering better hospitals, mental health and health services’ outlines the start of a ‘ten year roadmap for reform’ which focuses upon the early identification of mental illness, improving access to mental health services and integrating mental health service provision. Whilst this program of reform can be clearly located within a health framework there is some recognition that mental illness requires a holistic response, which includes, for example, reducing barriers to employment. However, the link between mental health treatment and the criminal justice sector is not explored or discussed in this document. It is estimated that one third of the institutional population of patients with diagnosed mental illnesses receive their treatment in a prison setting. This paper aims to explore the implications for a national strategy on mental health of ignoring the link between criminal justice service provision and mental health service provision to the wider community. There are several ‘gateways’ into health treatment, depending upon the needs and location of consumers. For the purposes of this paper we are primarily interested in the criminal justice gateway, and in particular the pathway to services for people in prison. There is a high level of differentiation and inequality in sentencing and program provision in criminal justice and correctional services across Australia and this has a substantial impact on the likelihood of accessing appropriate and timely mental health services. This situation contrasts with the apparently low tolerance of inequality in the health domain, and raises important issues about human rights and the structural organisation of health and criminal justice at state/territory and commonwealth levels.

Tuesday, 2pm, Private Dining Room 1 HARINDRANATH, Ramaswami University of Melbourne KHORANA, Sukhmani University of Queensland [email protected]; [email protected] New Technologies, Gandhian activism, and Democracy: Re‐examining civil society New communication technologies and social media have been celebrated by scholars as enabling a new kind of public activism and participation. While current events in the Middle East seem to support this view, a novel take on the links between these technologies and democratic change is presented by recent developments in India, where an anti‐corruption movement originating in the form of a hunger strike in New Delhi—a Gandhian form of social activism—generated wide‐spread support through Twitter and Facebook technology. Using Partha Chatterjee’s crucial distinction between political and civil societies in postcolonial nations, this paper will present an analysis of the different approaches to social activism adopted by urbanized middle‐class elites and rural groups in developing countries. The Twitter feeds of a major news outlet (such as NDTV) and a self‐organised civil society group (‘India Against Corruption’) will be examined over a one‐week period beginning from the day of the march. Such a close examination will help draw inferences about the use of Gandhian forms of activism in a new media context. This is crucial to understand the democratic efficacy and constitution of the so‐called Indian civil society.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 3 HEAD, Brian and COLLEY, Linda University of Queensland [email protected]; [email protected] Asset Sales: From financial necessity to policy opportunism? Policy responses to financial crises have been diverse, depending on such factors as the depth of the crisis, political support for reforms, and policy traditions. This paper considers one


response, the recourse to privatisation, by governments in four Australian states. It focuses on the policy frameworks and political context for privatising government enterprises, drawing on Kingdon’s framework for policy change to analyse differences in the substance and timing of decisions. In the 1990s, governments considered privatization as an economic and political strategy to resolve the problem of state‐level fiscal crises, but the pattern of adoption was variable. Two states resisted the general trend to privatization, but recently changed their position. We argue that the recent financial crisis provided a window for reintroducing contentious initiatives that had lost momentum and/or had been held for many years in the bottom drawer pending more propitious circumstances.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 3 HEAD, Brian, CHERNEY, Adrian and BOREHAM, Paul University of Queensland [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Policy Advice and Research Evidence: Is academic research 'lost in translation'? The head of the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet, Mr Terry Moran, recently claimed that most academic research addressing policy issues is poorly targeted and poorly communicated; it is therefore 'lost in translation' rather than utilised productively in the policy process. Think‐tanks and consultants are therefore more useful as external sources of policy analysis and advice than are academics, according to Mr Moran. His predecessor in that role, Dr Peter Shergold, has also reiterated that most academics make little effort to understand the needs and context of policy advisors working in public bureaucracies. Most of the literature on this theme emphasises the gulf between these 'two cultures', and relies on anecdotal information about why a few prominent academics, against the trend, are more influential than most of their colleagues. To fill some of the gaps in knowledge about research goals, research practices and their intersection with policy processes, this paper reports early findings from a systematic study of academic social researchers in Australia, and their relationships with policy bureaucrats (ARC Linkage on Research Utilisation). Stage 1 of the project involved surveys of research‐active social scientists, focusing on their attitudes to potential end‐uses of their research beyond the academy. We distinguish between academics who aim to influence policy thinking and those who are content to pursue peer‐reviewed professional publications for academic audiences. Among the former group we distinguish between those who undertake considerable research consultancy activities (contract research and advice) and those who seek impacts through research partnerships including ARC Linkage research. New findings are outlined concerning perceived forms of research influence and methods to build bridges across the great divide. Stage 2 of the project (yet to commence) will map the attitudes of public servants towards academic research as one of the forms of expert knowledge available as inputs to policy discussion within the public sector at state and federal levels.

Wednesday, 11am, Members Dining Room 3 HILL, Lisa University of Adelaide BUGEJA, Adam The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected] Changing Conceptions of Political Corruption in the Eighteenth Century In defining political corruption, scholars often distinguish between ‘classical’and ‘modern’ senses of the term. Until the end of the eighteenth century corruption had a much broader


meaning than it does today, referring less to the deviant actions of individuals than to the general moral health of the body politic. By contrast, modern corruption denotes abuses of the formal duties of a public role for pecuniary or status gains. This paper seeks to explain how and why the definition of corruption came to be narrowed in the eighteenth century by examining the writings of key figures of the period who were influential in shifting attention from a moralistic concern with public virtue to a more proto‐liberal concern for sound governance under commercial conditions. We explore historical trends that drove this shift, among them, increasing specialization, commercial progress, the expansion of domestic and foreign markets, the proliferation of luxury goods and the birth of the modern state. Such trends suggested the need for a sharpening of the line between private and public, market and state and a re‐thinking of what corruption really consisted in. Because the classical or ‘civic humanist’ framework that had hitherto shaped and dominated discourses of corruption was no longer adequate to make sense of commercial culture and the exigencies of governing modern, commercial polities, it gradually became obsolete.

Monday, 11.30am, Private Dining Room 2 HINDMOOR, Andrew University of Queensland [email protected] What's Wrong with Keith Dowding's Account of Systematic Luck and Power? Keith Dowding distinguishes between luck, systematic luck and power. Groups of people are systematically lucky if they can get what they get without acting because of the way society is structured. We maintain that in order to know whether a group is systematically lucky we need to know not only whether that group can get what it wants without acting but why it can get what it wants without acting. Some groups are, as the title of our article has it, lucky all the way down in the sense that they did nothing to fashion the structures from which they now benefit. But other groups have, in the past, used their power to fashion structures the emergence of which now allows them to get what they want without acting. Such groups should not be described as being systematically lucky.


HINDMOOR, Andrew and BELL, Stephen University of Queensland [email protected]; [email protected] A Culture of Caution: Vanilla banking in Australia before, during and after the GFC The Australian financial system emerged largely unscathed from the 2007/8 financial crisis. Why? What was so different about Australia and what lessons can be learnt from the Australian experience in terms of broader debates about the causes of the crisis and the reform measures needed to minimise the chances of a similar crisis occurring again? We argue that Australia was different because its banks exhibited a cautious culture of ‘vanilla’ banking focused upon the domestic mortgage market and commercial loans and did not did not reinvent themselves as ‘dealer’ banks. Why did vanilla banking survive in Australia but not in the US, the UK and other countries? One plausible set of explanations focus upon lesson‐learning by the Australian regulator and the banks themselves. But why did regulators and bankers in other countries not learn from their mistakes? What is important here is not simply whether agents learn lessons but whether lesson‐learning leads to structural changes which


alter agents’ incentives. In the Australian case the banking crisis led to a change in competition policy which reduced the incentives of the dominant banks to take risks and facilitated the emergence of a mutually beneficial and effective ‘relational’ banking culture between the banks and APRA.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 3 HINDMOOR, Andrew University of Queensland DOWDING, Keith and PACKER, Adam The Australian National University MARTIN, Aaron University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] The Agenda of ‘Policy Agendas in Australia’ The Policy Agendas Project (PAP) seeks to examine the stability of policy agendas over time. The original project of Baumgartner and Jones flowered into numerous articles and book by themselves and their colleagues, and inspired a similar exercise, the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), in countries around the world. Both PAP and CAP seek to answer similar questions, using similar methods, and based upon the original coding frame of Baumgartner and Jones to enable direct comparison. In this paper we seek to critically examine the theories and methods behind the PAP and CAP, doing so as we embark upon our own examination of policy agendas in Australia.

Tuesday, 10am, House of Representatives, Room 4 HOELSCHER, Kristian, MIKLIAN, Jason and VADLAMANNATI, Krishna University of Oslo [email protected]; [email protected]; kvadlam@uni‐goettingen.de Hearts and Mines: A district level empirical analysis of the Maoist conflict in India India's rapid economic growth over the last decade has been coupled with a Maoist insurgency that competes for the allegiances of rural populations with the state. In response to the threat, the Government of India has securitised development, using public works programs in an attempt to sway locals away from Maoist allegiance. However, these areas are also home to massive iron, coal, and steel factories that drive India's growth. This study uniquely aimed to address the lack of local‐level analysis and the lack of a robust dataset by merging previous qualitative fieldwork with disparate conflict data sources at the district level to explore different potential explanatory variables for the Maoist insurgency, including the relationship between development works, violence, and natural resource extraction. We find that while effective implementation of development programs like NREGA may indeed be loosely related to the suppression of violent activities in districts affected by the Maoist conflict, it is the presence of significant mining activity that is the best predictor of violence.

Monday, 9.45am, Secretariat


HOLLANDER, Robyn Griffith University [email protected] Federalism and the Moral Policy Dilemma Scholars have long associated federalism with social conservatism. Indeed, for some, it allowed states to engage in economic modernisation without any accompanying social reform. Nowhere is this more so than in the United States where the ‘states’ rights’ argument is invariably stained by the taint of slavery. There is, however, an alternative literature, which argues that the diversity facilitated by federalism can function to open up space for progressive social policies. This paper puts this opposing perspective to the test by identifying the prevalence of state difference across a spectrum of moral policy issues. These include same sex relationships, stem cell research, surrogacy, prostitution, euthanasia, and the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. While it is clear that federalism can sustain deeply conservative moral policy stances, the evidence suggests that it has also enabled the development of progressive policy where there is strong community support.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 1 HORIUCHI, Yusaku, ABJORENSEN, Norman and SATO, Meg The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Decomposition of Valence and Paradox of Primary Election When does a political party decide to hold a primary election to choose a candidate for the next election, and when does an incumbent decide to announce his/her political retirement? Furthermore, if they make decisions interactively, how do their decisions affect the quality of a candidate (‘valence’) who ends up running for the party? In this paper, we examine these questions by modeling a simple strategic game between a party and an incumbent. Specifically, by decomposing the valence into three factors, quality‐enhancing valence, incumbent candidate advantage, and residual valence, we show that a primary election may facilitate (potentially) high‐quality incumbents (ie, incumbents who could update quality‐enhancing valence by competing in the primary election) to retire unexpectedly. We call it a ‘paradox of primary election’ and introduce some qualitative examples from Australia.


HORIUCHI, Yusaku and SATO, Meg The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected]

Electoral Redistricting, Incumbency Advantage, and Endogenous Candidate Selection In this paper, we examine the effects of redrawing district boundaries (redistricting) on political parties' candidate selection strategies. This study is distinct from previous studies in two regards. First, we focus on a unique natural experimental setting in Australia, where a non‐partisan committee determines redistricting exogenously to the causal mechanism constituting the process of candidate selection. Second, we develop a formal model of endogenous candidate selection, which assumes strategic interactions by a party that won a seat in the previous election and a party that was defeated, and examine how an exogenous


shock (ie, redistricting) affects their decisions. Our empirical results based on the Australian Lower House election data for the period of 1990–2010 are consistent with an incumbency disadvantage hypothesis deduced from our model; namely, a greater magnitude of redistricting significantly increases the probability that the winning party will replace their incumbent legislator with a fresh candidate.


HUNDT, David Deakin University [email protected] Contesting Neo‐Liberalism in South Korea: Financial Crisis & Beyond This article focuses on Korean contestation over neo‐liberalism since the Asian financial crisis. It ascertains the degree to which civil society actors have contested, shaped and opposed neo‐liberalism amid the Korean economic model's transition from a corporatist‐inspired developmental state to a neo‐liberal mode of governance. Drawing on Charles Tilly's 'dynamics of contention' approach, we examine contestation over elements of neo‐liberalism such as the deregulation of labour markets, the reform of corporate governance, social policy, and free‐trade agreements. We find mixed evidence about the implementation of such policies and the capacity of civil society to oppose them. The article concludes that Korea's transition to neo‐liberalism is far from complete. Instead, Korea resembles a form of 'ordoliberalism', which retains a central place for state power.


HUSSEIN, Shakira University of Melbourne [email protected] From Rescue Missions to Discipline: Western political discourse on Muslim women during the post‐9/11 decade Muslim women have long been represented both as hapless victims in need of rescue and as dangerous agents of an alien ideology in need of discipline. At the outset of the post‐9/11 decade, the emphasis was very much on the former as a United States‐based feminist campaign converged with the United States political establishment to justify the military intervention in Afghanistan in the name of ‘rescuing’ Muslim women from the Taliban. With the death of bin Laden, the United States has fulfilled the original raison d’être for its military intervention in Afghanistan and returned the political discourse to its masculinist origins—at least for the moment. As ‘the Muslim issue’ has become an increasingly important issue in domestic as well as international politics in Europe, North America and Australia, the focus has shifted to Muslim women as agents as well as victims of Islamisation. The decade has been bookended by campaigns focusing on the role of the burka (face‐covering), initially as a symbol of Taliban misogyny and later as a symbol of Muslim infiltration of the West. While Muslim women have developed an articulate response to representations that focus on their need for rescue, the response to representation of Muslim women as perpetrators who must be disciplined into acquiescing to Western/Enlightenment/secular norms is still evolving.

Monday, 11.30am, Members Dining Room 1


HUSSEIN, Shakira University of Melbourne [email protected] ‘Real’ Islamic Studies: Taqiyya and the racialisation of Muslim identity Anti‐Muslim racism has generated its own internally coherent field of Islamic studies, which claims to be more accurate and trustworthy than either the version of Islam presented by Muslims or the post‐Saidian analyses of Islam produced by Western universities' Islamic studies departments, which are alleged to have been captured by Islamisation. The Islamic studies of anti‐Muslim discourse grounds itself in a version of Islamic theology that renders all Muslims as inherently untrustworthy, expansionist and potentially violent. A key rationale for attributing Muslims with a uniform collective identity according to this anti‐Muslim Islamic theology is the concept of taqiyya. Muslim discussion of taqiyya, or ‘action of covering, dissimulation’, originates in internal Muslim sectarian conflict and ‘denotes dispensing with the ordinances of religion in cases of constraint and when there is a possibility of harm’. However, in anti‐Muslim discourse it is defined as a religious obligation for Muslims to lie to non‐Muslims in order to serve the expansionist agenda of their religious identity. Muslims therefore stand condemned for this hidden agenda even when no criminal or anti‐social behaviour is visible. This paper will discuss racialised concepts of taqiyya in the ‘Catch the Fire’ religious vilification case in Victoria and in the allegations of Muslim‐ness against Barak Obama.

Monday, 2.30pm, House of Representatives Room 4 IHARA, Nobuhiro Kobe University [email protected] Rethinking the First Year of ASEAN, 1967–1968: How was the expansion of Indonesia’s influence in the region constrained? Many scholars devoted to the study of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) argue that the main objective in establishing the association was to draw Indonesia into intra‐regional relations in a friendly and constructive manner. These researchers often emphasize that one of the first achievements of this attempt was the moderate response from Indonesia to the bilateral tensions with Singapore, which surfaced due to the execution of two Indonesian marines in October 1968. However, ‘to draw Indonesia into intra‐regional relations’ includes not only the request that Indonesia restrain its behavior in cases of conflict with other countries. Also, firstly, in the face of Indonesia’s salient potential power in the region, it was important to ensure substantial equality among the members involved in the new organization. Such equality was needed to mitigate members’ concerns about Indonesia playing a leadership role in the organization and, in the longer term, utilizing ASEAN as a diplomatic tool to gain dominant status in the region. Secondly, by excluding military cooperation within the framework of ASEAN and continuing to rely on the United States and United Kingdom for defense, it was ensured that Indonesia would not play a bigger military role in regional cooperation. For instance, although a reference to the temporary nature of foreign bases was inserted in the ASEAN Declaration, the military presence of foreign countries in the region was maintained after the establishment of ASEAN. Anti‐communist and pro‐Western cooperation in the military field were also rejected within the framework of ASEAN. These decisions were aimed at preventing Indonesia enhancing its military influence in the region; if the foreign bases were withdrawn and ASEAN performed the military defense functions, there was concern that Indonesia may make a greater contribution to regional


defense as a ‘leader’ in the region. Although it was not certain whether ASEAN would function as its members had envisaged when the association was established, the expansion of Indonesian influence was kept under constraints, mitigating any uncertainty as to Indonesian motivations for membership of ASEAN. However there is a lack of historically detailed research concerning the kind of cooperation which occurred before the tension surfaced between Indonesia and Singapore. This is because regional cooperation in the early period of ASEAN developed slowly, and thus has not been an object of detailed analysis. This paper therefore examines how regional cooperation by ASEAN member countries sought to constrain the expansion of Indonesia’s influence during the first year of ASEAN. It especially focuses on how substantial equality among the members was ensured, how the military commitment of countries external to the region was maintained after the establishment of ASEAN, and how ASEAN countries continued to avoid military cooperation within the framework of the association.


INGRAM, Haroro Monash University [email protected] The Radicalisation Process: An interdisciplinary approach The exponential expansion of scholarship devoted to examining the radicalisation process over the last decade has been characterised by a growing tendency to quarantine the concept of radicalisation to the study of terrorism. The framing of radicalisation as somehow unique to the rise of terrorism has simultaneously fuelled misunderstandings of the radicalisation process and significantly limited the perceived applicability of the radicalisation paradigm as a framework to understand other social phenomenon. This study introduces to the field a paradigm of radicalisation grounded in an interdisciplinary approach. This article argues that 'radicalisation' is a process whereby an individual or collective increasingly adheres to a selectively literalist interpretation of an ideology (identity narrative), a response that is triggered and catalysed by a perception of crisis which, in its latter stages, can lead to the legitimisation and use of violence against a perceived antagonist (the Other). In doing so, the radicalisation process is framed as a universal phenomenon whereby many individuals cycle perpetually in and out of its early stages. However, in its latter stages the radicalisation process is characterised by four interdependent trends: increasing perceptions of crisis, increasing adherence to a selectively literalist interpretation of an ideology, essentialisation and demonization of the perceived Other, and increasing legitimisation and propensity towards violence.


JACKSON, Michael and GRACE, Damian University of Sydney [email protected]; [email protected] ‘Yes, Prince:’ Machiavelli's Reign in Management Since the 1967 publication of ‘Management and Machiavelli’ by Antony Jay (he of ‘Yes, Minister’), Niccolò Machiavelli has become a major figure in both the popular and academic management literature. That status is odd considering that Machiavelli in his public service career never managed anything and in his writings said nothing about business. However, by parallels, analogies, metaphors, long bows, sleights of hand and other literary tropes including even some downright falsehoods, Machiavelli has been established in the pantheon of


management thinkers. There he sits with Peter Drucker and Alfred Sloan in management and business encyclopaedias and dictionaries, as well as a steady trickle of trade books featuring his name in the title or subtitle. Meanwhile, business research journals publish a flow of empirical research on the Machiavellian personality construct in management. What do these third hand references to Machiavelli say and how does that relate to Niccolò’s original works? The first and most significant step in pressing Machiavelli into management service is to equate 16th Century Florence with our contemporary life and the second major move in this game is then to equate business with politics. Aside from documenting this Machiavellian avatar in the pages of the management literature, the paper also ponders the source of Machiavelli’s continuing allure. This trade in Machiavelli’s name has passed all but unnoticed by those schooled in political theory. Yet it behooves us to take the measure of these echoes of Machiavelli and to assess the accuracy of the Machiavelli they report. This paper has that goal.

Tuesday, 10am, Private Dining Room 2 JAIN, Sumitra Kumar Saheed Bhagat Singh College [email protected] Emerging Federal Political Culture in India: A survey of public perception The present study on ‘The Emerging Federal political culture in India: A survey of public perception’ is the only empirical study ever conducted to capture the public perception on the emerging issues of Indian federalism in general and federal political culture and structure of India in particular. The study has the backup of a database comprising of 500 respondents covered in five states in different regions of the country during 2009–10 and has overall methodical orientation encompassing qualitative and quantitative data analysis. Four key objectives were premised to be the focus of information gathering under the study which were as follows; 1) To study the public perception/attitude of people on the working of Indian federalism in contemporary India, 2) To examine the extent of support of people at various levels of government, center, state and local. 3) To ascertain how strong/weak is the public opinion on federal structure of India. 4) To study whether any federal political culture in India has emerged particularly in the era of coalition politics since 1990.

Monday, 9.45am, Secretariat JEFFREYS, Sheila University of Melbourne [email protected] Gender Eugenics: The transgendering of children In this paper I will argue that the transgendering of children should be understood as a harmful cultural practice which can be understood as the sterilisation of the unfit, ie those who do not fit the gender categories that form the foundation for male domination. In the last decade the transgendering of children has developed apace. In April 2011 in Australia, the Family Court agreed to the administration of puberty blocking drugs to a 10 year old boy. In the same month, in the UK, the administration of these drugs to 12 year olds diagnosed with gender identity disorder was approved. The effect of this treatment, if it is not reversed, but continues into full ‘transition’ from 16 years, is the sterilisation of the children. Transgenderism is a controversial topic for feminist theorists. Feminist critics of the practice argue that ‘gender’ is a social construction that needs to be questioned rather than carved onto bodies with hormones


and surgery. Supporters of transgenderism argue that such feminists are ‘transphobic’. The burgeoning practice of the transgendering of children involves gender clinics and therapists, family support groups, training for teachers and social workers in how to recognise a transgender child. It has brought into sharp relief the differences between the critical feminist perspective and the views of malestream psychiatry, and may constitute a tipping point for the social acceptance of transgenderism.

Monday, 11.30am, Members Dining Room 1 JOHN, Sarah Flinders University HARGREAVES, Leigh California State University, Fullerton [email protected]; [email protected] The Alternative Vote in Australia: Exacerbating a culture of adversarialism? This paper models the outcomes of South Australian state lower house elections from 1997–2010 under four different preferential vote counting methods: the Alternative Vote (AV), the Borda Count, Bucklin Voting, Coombs' Method and the Condorcet Method. The model uses voting data from the Electoral Commission of South Australia, coupled with each candidate's submitted 'how‐to‐vote' (HTV) material. The results of the model confirm the findings of Rae that AV behaves in the much same manner as plurality voting. However, our data shows that AV is unique among preferential voting methods in this regard. In all other preferential systems modelled, a greater number of parties gain representation in the lower house and in most years no one party would win a majority in the lower house. The paper then considers the wider ramifications of the AV system on political discourse in Australia, which at present is characterised by a highly partisan and adversarial tenor. The observed increase in minor party representation in other preferential methods is attributed to the major parties' tendency to preference each other last (or near last) on their HTV cards. The AV method generally makes no use of these last preferences, but all other voting methods considered are sensitive to them. We conclude that the use of a non‐AV preferential voting method would provide an incentive for the major parties not to preference each other last on their HTV cards, in order to avoid the 'mutually assured destruction' scenario observed in this study. We further discuss whether a non‐AV preferential voting method would provide incentives for a more constructive and bi‐partisan public discourse between the major parties.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 5 JOSE, Jim University of Newcastle [email protected] Trawling the Murky Shallows: Perceptions of Empire in the Straits Settlements 1893–1915 To understand the ways in which empire was imagined historian Duncan Bell noted that we should look to the murky shallows of recondite political argument rather than the high waves of political theory and policy debate. At the close of the nineteenth century, the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang and several Malay states sat on the periphery of the British Empire. The Straits Settlements came into being early in the nineteenth century, not quite a prize of conquest nor a properly settler society. By 1867 they were formally constituted as a Crown Colony. They were geographically and administratively peripheral yet very much in and of the empire. Among members of the ruling colonial elite, especially those who were


members of the Straits Philosophical Society (SPS), there was considerable concern over the future shape of the British Empire at a time of increasing imperial rivalry, unfolding conflict in southern Africa, and a felt need for the empire to develop a more embedded sense of unity. Ideas about imperial federation, imperial citizenship, a greater Britain, and indeed the very notion of ‘empire’ were commonly discussed, both in England and throughout the colonies, as possible ways of ensuring the ongoing viability of the British Empire. In the Straits Settlements, the SPS provided a space in which these ideas circulated. Many of the essays presented at its monthly meetings were replete with references to empire, its nature and the proper organisation of imperial rule. This paper explores the views of members of the SPS on these matters, and in so doing, sheds some light on the recondite imperial imaginings of those engaged in managing a corner of the empire at a time when the latter’s global reach was approaching its high water mark.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 2 KEANE, Conor Macquarie University [email protected] Ten Years in Afghanistan: A Comparative analysis of the Soviet and US occupations Although the United States (US) and their allies have spent almost a decade in Afghanistan, the country remains unstable and conflict‐ridden. Despite efforts at state‐building and the recent military surge, authority is fragmented and the Taliban‐led insurgency remains a potent force in the country. During the 1980s the Soviets spent a decade in Afghanistan and attempted to do much the same as the United States: that is, enforce an alien ethos on a populace unfamiliar with centralised governance. The USSR failed in its endeavour and a withdrawal after ten years precipitated the return to anarchy, where rapacious warlords carved out competing bubbles of authority. This paper critically contrasts these two interventions in respect to governance and security by addressing three questions: 1) How similar have the two occupations been in terms of policy prerogatives and commitment? 2) Is the current US intervention plagued by the same problems as the Soviet occupation? 3) Will the tumultuous environment that manifested after the Soviet withdrawal occur following the removal of US troops? Whilst similarities between the two occupations emerge, there are also a number of differences. First, the fact that the US operates under a UN mandate contrasts sharply with the international condemnation that followed the Soviet intervention, lending the former legitimacy, funding and expertise. Second, there was almost universal opposition toward Soviet forces from the Afghan populace; in respect to the current occupation this is neither widespread nor entrenched. This paper argues that if the US can incorporate the cultural and social nuances of Afghanistan into its state‐building policy, backed by a firm security commitment, the country may yet emerge as a stable political unit. However, failure to do so will lead to a repeat of the 1990s and the reversion of Afghanistan to civil war and extremism.


KELLY, Norm The Australian National University [email protected] Women’s Representation in Melanesia: Prospects for the Future The island nations of the Pacific have traditionally been very poor in providing representation for women. Of the nine countries listed by the Inter‐Parliamentary Union as having no women representatives in their parliaments, five are in the Pacific. In Papua New Guinea, there is only one woman in a total of 109 members in the national parliament. In the Solomon Islands, there are no women in the 50‐member parliament. This paper assesses the current situation in


Melanesia, and identifies the factors that militate against women being elected. Proposals for increasing women’s representation, including a system of reserved seats for Papua New Guinea, are considered, and the results of the 2010 elections in the Solomon Islands and the Autonomous Region of Bougainville are analysed to determine what changes are required to provide women with a greater chance for election in the South Pacific region.


KENNEDY, Andrew The Australian National University [email protected] Red Dragon, Green Energy: Techno‐nationalism in China's approach to renewable energy China's approach to renewable energy technologies has important long‐term implications for a range of pressing international issues, from climate change to economic competition to energy security. This paper explores how the Chinese government has approached the development and diffusion of such technologies within China since 2005, focusing on the role of ‘techno‐nationalism’ in Chinese policy making in particular. It begins by reviewing the literature on techno‐nationalism and developing a typology that differentiates between more or less techno‐nationalist views. It then examines the Chinese policy discourse with respect to renewable energy technologies to identify the extent to which the elements of techno‐nationalism are present. Lastly, it evaluates the congruence between Chinese techno‐nationalism and Chinese policy in the renewable energy sphere.


KENNY, Meryl University of New South Wales VERGE, Tania Universitat Pompeu Fabra [email protected]; [email protected] Decentralization, Political Parties and Women's Representation: Evidence from the United Kingdom and Spain This paper explores the hitherto under‐researched relationship between political decentralization and women’s political representation, specifically their descriptive or numerical presence. In doing so, we adopt a party‐centered approach, arguing that political parties are a key mediating variable between the formal institutions of the state and gender equality outcomes. The empirical analysis evaluates this relationship in the context of a qualitative comparative case study of the adoption and implementation of candidate gender quotas in the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the British Labour Party. We conclude that party organizational dynamics play a key role in explaining numerical increases in women’s representation and that political parties need to be considered as independent (and gendered) actors in any analysis of the relationship between state architecture and women’s politics.

Tuesday, 4pm, Members Dining Room 1 KING, Tom The Australian National University [email protected] The Rise and Demise of the DLP


This paper examines the reasons for the origins and demise of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The reasons for the DLP coming into being are explored along with the major players responsible. These players include the Industrial Groups, the parliamentary Australian Labor Party (ALP) and its leadership, a divided but influential Catholic Hierarchy, the Movement and BA Santamaria, along with the Groupers and perhaps the most influential, Mannix the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne. This paper argues that Mannix had an influence over a number of the other players including Santamaria, the Groupers and the Catholic Heirarchy (but not all of it). This paper also argues that Mannix and Santamaria gave their own meaning to ‘Catholic action’ to suit their own political ends. A number of people and organisations, and not one person or organisation, were responsible for the DLP coming into being. The reasons for the demise of the DLP in 1974 so soon after its strong showing in the 1970 Senate election are discussed and these reasons include basis reasons such as relevance, lack of finance, the party’s perceptions by the press, the party’s leadership and the structure of the Party. Other reasons are the Gair affair and the party being seen as a hate or revenge party. Significantly, the DLP ignored its performance in the House of Representatives elections a true indicator of its level of support and allowed itself to be mesmerised by its performance in the Senate elections. Its results in the Senate were often influenced by the level of protest votes against the major parties. This paper uses Pederson’s representation of party life spans and discusses the various influences and drivers that caused the DLP to move around the party life span curve through the thresholds of declaration, authorization, representation and relevance. The paper concludes that the reasons for the rise and fall of the DLP serve as a useful lesson for other minor parties to monitor such indicators as leadership and relevance if they wish to survive.


KLASSEN, Andrew The Australian National University [email protected] The Evolution of Political Legitimacy: Socioeconomic development and human needs Political legitimacy is fundamentally important but inherently problematic. It is important because legitimate governing authorities usually resort to less repression and violence (to obtain compliance). It is problematic because there is broad agreement regarding the meaning of legitimacy, but extensive disagreement about how it is justified. A widely agreeable definition of political legitimacy would be the right or acceptability of governing authorities to govern (usually as determined by those governed), but justifications vary from traditions and customs to accountability and elections. This presents curious puzzles for understanding how legitimacy is obtained and maintained. On one hand, citizens in different political systems, such as democratic and authoritarian, may view their respective authorities as legitimate. On the other hand, particular groups within the same society may reach divergent conclusions about the legitimacy of their governing authorities. This paper argues that justifications for legitimacy evolve over time as societies develop and people’s needs change. The theoretical framework is based on a modified version of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The central hypothesis of the theory is that legitimacy judgements are motivated by (1) people’s individual needs and (2) how well they perceive governing authorities to be fulfilling those needs. A match or mismatch between people’s needs and authorities’ performance determines whether legitimacy judgments are positive or negative. Maintaining legitimacy therefore entails authorities being responsive to citizens’ needs and adjusting their actions accordingly. Authorities better suited to governing a particular society are expected to be considered more legitimate, and therefore have a better chance of surviving. A needs‐based perspective of legitimacy is notable for having considerable explanatory potential. First, it is


applicable across different political systems and socioeconomic conditions because it is based on human needs. This helps us understand why citizens in democratic as well as authoritarian regimes may consider their authorities as legitimate. Second, the theory provides and explanation for how revolutions and democratic transitions may be grounded in unsatisfied needs. The brief explanation is that when a regime fails to advance needs satisfaction for a generation or longer, pressure starts building for progress among the younger generations. Third, the theory describes how different socioeconomic groups within a society may make divergent legitimacy judgements because of their different levels of deprivation. When it comes to making legitimacy judgements, poorer groups are expected to care about different things than richer groups. A needs‐based theory of legitimacy therefore provides a potentially powerful analytical tool for comparative political research.


KORKUT, Umut Glasgow Caledonian University [email protected] Liberalization Troubles: Elitism, populism, and progressivism This paper investigates why the process of liberalization in the New EU member states faces troubles and stimulates the ascendance of right‐wing conservatism as a reaction despite successful transitions to democracy and liberalizing reforms facilitated by the European Union accession process. At the onset of political and economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), many believed that liberalism has always found its strength in its ability to act as the enemy of tradition and the speaker for modernity. The unfolding of events in the region in the early 1990s demonstrated that liberalism participated in socialism’s final defeat by exposing its economic irrationality, its political despotism, and its immense social and intellectual conservatism. Thereafter, in countries with no prior history of political democracy and market economy, liberalism became the harbinger of a new state and society to be built without any delay to join the EU. This seemingly final victory provided liberalism with a unique historical opportunity wherein it finally possessed all the rights and duties to influence the course of transformation in the new polities and economies of Central and Eastern Europe. However, as this paper demonstrates there have been mounting endogenous and exogenous challenges for liberalism in its quest. First, liberalization, an organic segment of both democratization and Europeanization, is not progressive but can be disaggregate. Second, liberalization is prone to consolidate the role of elites at the expense of the public. Finally, the global economic crisis bolstered a new conservative reaction to liberalization—not only to its economic but also its political virtues. This paper debates these issues looking into the case of the New EU member states and specifically concentrates on Hungary. The paper is a part of a book coming out on liberalization troubles.

Wednesday, 9am, Secretariat KUMARASINGHAM, Harshan University of London [email protected] The 1975 Dismissal: The view from Whitehall In November 1975, the Queen’s representative in Australia Governor‐General, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Labor leader Gough Whitlam as Prime Minister and appointed the Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Fraser in his place in a dramatic bid to end the political deadlock


paralysing the country. This hugely controversial act brought what many Australians believe to be the greatest political crisis to hit the ‘Lucky Country’. This was not just Australia’s crisis—this was a crisis the rocked the foundations of the Westminster system throughout the Commonwealth. The events in Australia proved that Westminster’s sacrosanct conventions surrounding the practice of power particularly those of the Crown could be used in ways that had long been thought unavailable in practice though available in theory. The position of Kerr as the Queen’s Representative drew Whitehall into the crisis along with its special understanding and involvement in Australia. The crisis tested Australia’s position as a monarchy and its faith in British institutions. Britain was greatly concerned by the crisis and whether this contagion of constitutional upheaval could spread across the Commonwealth and even to Britain by questioning long established conventions, institutions and relationships. Documents recently released in the United Kingdom shed light on the involvement and knowledge of Whitehall in this constitutional saga, which, due to its historic relationship was probably greater than any other country. These newly released papers from Britain’s National Archives show how much Britain watched the Dismissal and analysed the ramifications of it for the monarchy, the Commonwealth, its relationship with Australia and for Australia itself. The view from Whitehall available now after years of being classified is an important addition to the controversy that still surrounds this seminal event and the enduring debate on Australia’s political future that it caused.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 5 LAI, Jikon The Australian National University [email protected] Crisis, Liberalisation and Development: The evolution of Malaysia's financial sector since the Asian financial crisis This paper traces the evolution of the financial sector of Malaysia since 1997 when it was hit with the shock of the Asian Financial Crisis. It appeared to many at that time that Malaysia was turning its back against the market, as the government adopted a state‐led approach in managing the crisis and introduced capital controls on outward financial flows. This was in contradiction to the expectations of many commentators, particularly those based in the ‘West’, that the crisis itself had exposed weaknesses in the governance, management and institutions of not just their financial sectors but also their economies more generally, and that this was symptomatic of excessive government intervention in the market. In analysing changes in the financial sector of Malaysia since 1997, the paper seeks to determine whether the state’s active role extended beyond the period of the crisis or whether it responded to the criticisms raised post‐crisis about the negative effects of state intervention. A detailed account of key reforms and changes in the landscape of Malaysia’s financial sector suggests that while the state continues steer, intervene and interfere in the financial sector, there have also been greater market liberalisation and the introduction of new market dynamics. Key developments in Malaysia’s financial sector, in particular the emergence and significant growth of Islamic finance, also suggest that ‘developmental’ policies, previously applied to the manufacturing sector, are now being attempted in the services sector. The case of Malaysia’s financial sector therefore suggests that despite the dominance of the discourse on liberal market economies, state intervention persists and appears to have material effect on bringing about developmental outcomes, in this case, in an area that has not previously been studied, ie the services sector.

Tuesday, 4pm, Secretariat


LANGMORE, John University of Melbourne EGELAND, Jan Norwegian Institute of International Affairs [email protected]; [email protected] Distinctive Features of Norwegian Foreign Policy: Possible lessons for Australia There are many similarities between Norway and Australia amongst them the framework of foreign policy through commitment to the international rule of law, the UN, alliance with the US and freedom from binding membership of supranational regional organisations. Yet there are several distinctive aspects of Norwegian foreign policy, which offer fresh insights into what might be identified as national interests. These include major investments in peaceful conflict resolution, disarmament initiatives and foreign aid. Norway’s ‘extended interests’ in projecting social justice and peace are regarded as equal expressions of the national interest in the era of global integration with the active projection of more classical self‐interest in the resource rich Northern regions and within the NATO‐alliance. Australian utilitarianism is a sufficiently strong justification for adoption or adaptation of ‘extended interests’ as is near political consensus for their continuation in Norway. Six opportunities for strengthening Australia’s international soft power engagement are illuminated by the Norwegian example. They include: reconsideration of the orientation of traditional defence strategy through integration with other aspects of foreign affairs and public policy; ending the financial deprivation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; establishing capacity for practical conflict resolution; strengthening departmental policy development and scholarly research on contemporary disarmament; increasing international aid and especially the proportion allocated through multilateral agencies and NGOs; and increasing cooperation with and support for NGOs involved in concrete programs for international peace and justice, public education and scholarship.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 2 LAU, Joanne The Australian National University [email protected] Citizens, Residence and Democratic Participation If residence and citizenship are two bases upon which we can calibrate who should be enfranchised, combining them gives us four possible groups: resident citizens, resident non‐citizens, non‐resident citizens and non‐resident non‐citizens. Clearly, resident citizens should be allowed to vote, and non‐resident non‐citizens should not. But, for national elections, non‐resident citizens are allowed to vote in 115 countries, while resident non‐citizens (that is, resident foreign nationals) are only enfranchised in two. Why is citizenship what matters in allowing individuals to vote? In this paper, I briefly consider the historical reason for using citizenship as the basis for enfranchisement. I then offer an alternative account for the enfranchisement of resident foreign nationals based on a variation of the all‐affected principle. Residence as a ground for enfranchisement, I argue, allows for the inclusion of people who are subject to the laws of a state in a way that aligns with general and common sense democratic principles of who should rule and be ruled in turn.



LAVELLE, Ashley Griffith University [email protected] The Politics of the ‘Working Family’ The term ‘working family’ has been employed assiduously by leading members of both the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments. The expression embodies not only a rhetorical device aimed at a target electoral constituency—in other words, families on low to middle incomes—but also a range of normative assumptions about the way in which we should live in 21st century capitalist life. This usage of what has become a cliché is indicative of broader trends in politics. While numerous economic, political and social institutions continue to be the subject of critique in public life, the family no longer receives any critical assessment from the left, despite its interrelationship to a range of social problems, including domestic violence, and despite earlier radical takes on the nuclear family under capitalism as an arrangement designed to reproduce fresh layers of wage labourers. Measured by its capacity to shape and mould our way of thinking in our formative years, and to inculcate in us an appreciation of the importance of obedience and respect for hierarchy, the family is a political institution par excellence. Moreover, in the case of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) the ‘working family’ represents not only the reification of the nuclear family, but is symptomatic of the party’s abandonment of any semblance of class politics: the ‘working family’ has supplanted the ‘working class’, which has been rendered unutterable in the Labor lexicon.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 5 LEE, Will University of Western Australia [email protected] Evaluating the Pospects of a Democratic Security Community Between Australia and Indonesia The democratisation of Indonesia’s political system since 1997 is significant for proponents of the ‘democratic peace’ theory, who claim that shared liberal‐democratic norms and institutions mitigate war between democratic countries. This contrasts with previous attempts in the early 1990s to construct an Australia‐Indonesia ‘security community’ undergirded primarily by leaders’ contacts and converging strategic interests. Accordingly, Indonesia’s democratisation could portend a democratic security community between itself and Australia, characterised by a liberal collective identity and ‘dependable expectations of peaceful change’. This paper is less sanguine about such a prospect. Drawing on Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett’s framework on how security communities develop, I compare Australia’s attempts to construct a modus vivendi, or perhaps, a ‘community’ with Indonesia across two recent time periods, 1988 to 1999, and 1999 to the present. I argue that security cooperation in the current period more closely approximates that of a ‘regime’ compared to that of the early 1990s, which exhibited signs of a nascent security community, albeit restricted to the elite levels. Indonesia’s democratisation is encouraged by Canberra for its role in disrupting the vaunted nexus between illiberalism and terrorism, rather than its alleged trust‐building functions.



LEE KOO, Katrina The Australian National University [email protected] Protecting War‐affected Children in Post‐2001 Afghanistan: An ontological challenge for IR? The 2001‐ conflict in Afghanistan has had a major impact, both positive and negative, upon the lives of Afghan children. Some children have enjoyed access to school, better health care, humanitarian aid, and been the beneficiaries of international development programs. However, children have also been the victims of military attacks, forced belligerency, trafficking, sexual violence, social and political upheaval, and disruption to educational and health services. Thus, like all civilians, children are conflict‐affected. This paper seeks to interrogate IR’s knowledge of conflict‐affected children in post‐2001 Afghanistan by critically engaging the ontological foundations of the two central concepts: conflict, and children. It demonstrates that conflict is conceptualised as primarily public sphere violence, and children are conceptualised as primarily private sphere innocents. This has led to the belief in the international community that children can be effectively isolated and protected from conflict, and that they should be universally considered as being apart from conflict. However, this paper demonstrates that child protection in conflict is not that straight‐forward. Instead, it argues that children and the idea of children play an important role in the Afghan conflict in ways that are central to the execution of conflict on both sides. It illustrates the liberal investment in child protection on the part of the International Coalition in Afghanistan (ISAF), the strategic value of investing children (as victims and belligerents) in the conflict by the insurgency, and the inescapable impact of the conflict on children more broadly. Thus, far from being seen as apart from conflict, children need to be analysed as a central element of it.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 2 LITTLE, Adrian and MACDONALD, Kate University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected] The Social Foundations of Global Democracy: Rethinking analogies with the nation‐state Critiques of the project of global democracy are often grounded on claims about the social conditions necessary to sustain democratic practices at the national level, followed by claims that these conditions are absent at the global level. Emphasis is often placed on the notion of a cohesive ‘demos’ as a necessary social foundation to underpin functional democratic institutions. We argue that this way of thinking about analogies between national and global democracy is flawed in two important ways. First, this strategy of critique mischaracterises the social conditions necessary to sustain democratic practices at the national level, resting on overly idealised accounts of both democracy and the social conditions necessary to underpin it. Second, these critiques misconceptualise the appropriate object of the analogy, focusing on features of the ‘demos’ in isolation rather than on the ‘fit’ between the demos, the systems of social power that democratic practices seek to regulate, and the specific democratic practices being pursued. Established approaches have usefully identified relevant characteristics of the demos—focusing on configurations of power, interest, value and identity—and useful analogies can be drawn at this general level. However, such approaches have often underplayed the importance of understanding how the demos interacts with wider social and political institutions in determining the extent to which given characteristics of the demos will impede or enable meaningful democratic practices in a given context. We suggest that if aspiring global democrats are to derive useful lessons from social struggles to create and sustain democratic practices within nation states, a much less idealised and institutionally


prescriptive approach to conceptualising analogies between national and global democracy is required. We illustrate how this analogy can be re‐thought with reference to cases from both national and global levels, in which imperfect yet meaningful democratic practices have survived under highly inhospitable conditions. At the national level, we examine the case of Northern Ireland, a divided society in which democratic institutions have emerged in the context of intense social conflict and inequalities of power; at the global level, we examine the emergence of democratic practices within systems of transnational business regulation, in the presence of highly unequal power relationships between transnational businesses and marginalised workers and communities in the developing world. In both cases, we show that the success with which democratic practices have been established and sustained has depended not only on configurations of structural conditions of the kinds identified above, but also on how effectively social actors have mobilised democratic agency to transform or work around unfavourable structural conditions.

Monday, 9.45am, Private Dining Room 2

LYNCH, Timothy University of Melbourne [email protected] ‘A Change of Leaders is the Joy of Fools’: Obama, Bush and continuity in American foreign policy This paper argues that Barack Obama, despite cosmetic changes and the hopes of his supporters, has continued the foreign policy of George W Bush. Rather than offering a decisive break with a failing strategy, Obama has accepted the logic of Bush’s war on terror and has sought to wage it more competently. This contemporary comparison allows us to observe just how far continuity characterises foreign policy from one president to another. The paper will address the consequences—both good and bad—of such continuity, when and why it obtains and what this reveals about American foreign policy and national security strategy more generally.


LYNCH, Timothy University of Melbourne [email protected] Bush, Obama and the Arab Spring: From crisis to uncertainty to democracy? This paper assesses George W Bush’s democracy promotion efforts in the Middle East. It asks how far his rhetoric was matched by an operable strategy and how far that strategy can be credited with a catalytic role in the 2011 ‘Arab spring’. The paper’s argument is that Bush’s strategy was neither as effective as he would like to believe nor as negligible as his political, and especially academic, opponents insist. This analysis and attendant argument allows us to place Bush’s democracy promotion strategy alongside those of his predecessors and of his successor, Barack Obama.


MACDONALD, Terry Monash University [email protected]

On Legitimacy: The Real 'First Virtue' of Global Political Institutions

One of the greatest practical challenges in contemporary political life is the problem of how to design global institutions so that they satisfy the complex standards of justification appropriate


for such powerful political entities. Although many ‘cosmopolitan’ theories of global liberal justice and democracy have been proposed for global institutions, there is deep and widespread disagreement on the more basic question of whether standards of liberal justice or democracy of any kind are appropriate when applied directly to global institutions. Even among the staunchest defenders of domestic liberalism and democracy, many deny the validity of their straightforward global extension. Against the backdrop of such entrenched disagreement, it has been proposed by some philosophical commentators (as well as by countless international social scientists and practitioners concerned with global institutional reform) that the most appropriate normative standard with which to begin in the design of global institutions is not that of justice or democracy but rather some more basic standard of institutional 'legitimacy'. Two simple propositions about the property of legitimacy are commonly advanced in the course of such arguments. First, legitimacy is a good thing and we want global institutions to have more of it. Second, the liberal norms of democracy and social justice that deliver legitimacy within many nation‐states are not necessarily the right ones for delivering legitimacy within global institutions. Taken together, these propositions imply that legitimacy is a special kind of virtue of institutions—a normative quality that is at a basic level distinct from (although under certain conditions potentially converging or overlapping with) the institutional virtues of democracy and justice. My interest here is in one particular kind of claim that is sometimes made about the character of this ‘freestanding’ normative quality: that it is an institutional virtue consisting (at least) in, and valuable (at least in part) because of, its function of harnessing a special kind of motivated support for institutional norms among the institution’s subject populations. More specifically: it is a necessary (though not necessarily a sufficient) condition for the legitimacy of an institution that its justifying reasons have motivational force for its participants—in other words, that its participants are motivated to support the institution by endorsement (at some level within their ‘motivational sets’) of the same reasons that provide the basis for its normative justification. My broad goal in this paper is to make some first tentative steps towards a fuller theoretical understanding of a normative quality of legitimacy of this kind, and an understanding of both what might be desirable about, and prescriptively required by, the goal of creating global institutions that are legitimate in this sense.

Monday, 9.45am, Private Dining Room 2 MAHONEY, Greg and SADLEIR, Chris University of Canberra [email protected]; [email protected] Intergration within CER: Regulating FDI, crises and the challenge of cultural norms Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is integral to regional integration under Closer Economic Relations (CER). However, the integration of the regulatory frameworks for FDI has received less attention than those related to trade in goods and services. In spite of the signing of the long awaited investment protocol there is no mention of a single investment authority to govern and review inwards investment into Australia and New Zealand. This is in marked contrast to areas where significant integration has been achieved under CER as evidenced by an agency such as Food Standards Australia New Zealand. This paper examines the regulatory frameworks for FDI in Australia and New Zealand and shows that integration faces the challenge of melding two quite separate sets of cultural norms to fashion regulatory practice. Governments on either side of the Tasman seeking to promote further integration must confront, design and craft regulatory practice which respond to such norms. Greater integration regularly faces external shocks that test extant regulatory practice. By examining the effects of three crises—globalisation, the global financial crisis and food security—experienced on both sides of the Tasman, we identify tensions between norms and trans‐


Tasman governance. From this experience we draw inferences to aid understanding of impediments to integration. Tentative assessments are made regarding the role of norms in shaping regulatory practice in the integrating projects of ASEAN and the EU.

Monday, 11.30am, House of Representatives Room 3 MARK, Craig Macquarie University [email protected] Domestic and Regional Politics of Japan, Post‐3/11 The March 11 Tohoku earthquake of 2011, with its resulting tsunami and ongoing nuclear emergency, has been the greatest crisis faced by Japan since WWII. Japanese politics, the economy and society, and its place in the region were already in a state of some malaise before the disaster. This paper will consider how the crisis has affected the domestic politics of Japan, and the potential implications for Japan’s diplomatic and strategic role in the wider Asia‐Pacific region. It considers whether the crisis is a potential catalyst for recovery.

Tuesday, 4pm, Secretariat MARTIN, Aaron University of Melbourne [email protected] Political Participation Among the Young in Australia: Testing Dalton’s Theory Good Citizen Thesis In his 2008 book The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation is Reshaping American Politics Russell Dalton argues, as the subtitle suggests, that young people are ‘reshaping American politics.’ Dalton’s good citizen thesis argues that young people, in the US and in other advanced democracies, are much more likely to engage in non‐electoral forms of participation (such as attending a demonstration and signing a petition) and less likely to participate in electoral forms of activity (such as voting and joining a political party). However, Dalton does not examine whether young people are more likely to engage in non‐electoral activity outside of the US. This article asks whether Dalton’s good citizen thesis applies to Australia. Using the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Citizenship survey that was released in 2006 this article applies Dalton’s good citizen thesis to Australia to examine whether the trends Dalton found in the United States (US) are also found in Australia. Therefore, this paper applies Dalton’s argument in the Australian context by asking two questions: 1. Is non‐electoral activity higher among the young (and electoral engagement lower)? 2. If so, is age the most important factor in determining patterns of political participation or are other factors more important?

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 5 MASTERS, Adam The Australian National University [email protected] Privatised Policing on a Global Scale?: Interpol’s new partnerships International government organizations (IGOs) are going through a period of change. Many IGOs that were once predominantly state funded organizations are now being squeezed by member‐states financially and politically into a new model of funding and operations. More often IGOs are turning to non‐member‐state actors at both national and transnational levels. Most academic attention regarding this change has focussed on the development and health


agendas. In contrast, little attention has been given to this process elsewhere. In 2004, INTERPOL entered into a partnership with the Sloan Foundation, an American philanthropic organization, to provide bio‐terrorism training to police globally. This broke with 80 years of reliance on member‐states for funding. This paper will explore this and others events in the context of changes sparked within INTERPOL and the attitude of member‐countries to these new relationships with non‐member‐country actors.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 2 MAYERSEN, Deborah University of Queensland [email protected] Operationalising the Preventive Component of the Responsibility to Protect: Strategies and implementation At the World Summit in 2005, UN Member States unanimously endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) principle. This principle highlighted the responsibility of each nation state and the international community to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Preventing the outbreak of such mass atrocities was recognized as a core component of RtoP. This paper explores the range of strategies that can be utilized for mass atrocity prevention. These include structural prevention strategies, suitable for long‐term prevention efforts; strategies for direct prevention, suitable for consideration when there appears to be an escalating risk of mass atrocities; and late stage direct prevention strategies that are most appropriate when there is a high likelihood of imminent atrocities. Most of these strategies, however, have long been recognised as part of the arsenal for conflict and mass atrocity prevention. In order to maximize their effectiveness in preventing future RtoP crises, we need to reconsider how and when these strategies are utilized. This paper explores how preventive strategies can be utilized to maximum effect through a strategic framework for operationalisation. It proposes that employing preventive strategies within a framework of early intervention, ongoing engagement, flexibility and cooperation may offer the best prospects for preventing future occurrences of mass atrocities.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 1 MCALLISTER, Ashley University of Sydney [email protected] Do Welfare to Work Policies Work for People with a Mental Illness? Much attention around the 2011–12 Australian Budget focused on two central areas—getting people who are on the ‘dole’ into work, and heavily investing in mental health to reduce detrimental individual and societal impacts. However among almost all analyses, one aspect that was left out of the spotlight was how these two policy areas are interconnected. People with mental illness make up a large proportion of recipients receiving income support payments such as the Disability Support Pension in Australia. For example, just over one third of DSP recipients have a mental illness, and about half of single parents on income support have a mental illness. As such, it is imperative that the gap between health and welfare policies is bridged. This paper endeavours to begin to build this bridge by comparatively reviewing welfare‐to‐work policies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom in the attempt to discover whether welfare‐to‐work policies work for people with a mental illness. It will examine the current welfare policies in all four countries and compare and


contrast the design of the policies in relation to mental illness. It will consider how these countries define capacity to work, imposed sanctions which could result in lost benefits, and how the level of benefits differ between disability related benefits and general income support benefits. In particular this paper hopes to identify areas for policy improvement.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 1 MCALLISTER, Ian and PIETSCH, Juliet The Australian National University BEAN, Clive Queensland University of Technology [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Explaining the Outcome of the 2010 Australian Federal Election The 2010 federal election was unusual for three reasons. First, the popular Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was ousted from office just two months before the election, the first time Labor had replaced a first term prime minister. Second, Rudd’s replacement was Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister. And third, the Labor government failed to secure a majority and was forced to form a minority government, the first since 1940. This paper uses the 2010 Australian Election Study to examine patters of voting in the election. The results show that Labor’s failure to secure a majority rested largely in its inability to convince the electorate that it was an effective economic manager, and that Australia’s successful weathering of the global financial crisis was the result of Labor policies. Both major party leaders, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, were new and therefore unfamiliar to voters. Julia Gillard was particularly popular among female voters and her overall impact on the vote was slightly greater than that of Tony Abbott. Defectors from Labor to the Greens disapproved of Kevin Rudd’s dismissal from office and were more supportive of Coalition education policies. Health was an important issue for those defecting from Labor to the Coalition. Perhaps surprisingly, global warming and the resources tax were relatively unimportant factors in the vote. Overall, the results point to the enduring importance of voters’ perceptions of economic management, and to health and education policies in shaping the vote.

Wednesday, 9am, Members Dining Room 3 MCCALLUM, Kerry University of Canberra [email protected] Managing the Optics: Media representation and indigenous policymaking This paper reports on the local knowledge of policy actors about the role of news media in the development of Indigenous health policy. Indigenous health is frequently referred to as a ‘wicked’ or ‘intractable’ policy problem, while studies of media representation reinforce the role of journalists in narrowing, sensationalizing, or shutting down constructive public debate. But few studies have explored the way the actors in the policymaking process understand each other’s roles. The Australian news media and Indigenous policy‐making 1988–2008 project is investigating the relationships between media attention to Indigenous issues and the development of Indigenous policy within specific discursive environments. We have analysed media texts, policy documents, public statements, and the local knowledge of those involved in the policymaking process. This paper reports on the qualitative analysis of over 30 interviews exploring policymakers’, policy advocates’ and journalists’ understanding of the


relationships between journalism and the policymaking process. The paper draws on theories of public opinion, risk and framing to examine the processes through which policy professionals integrate, negotiate and contest media representation of Indigenous issues in the practice of developing and implementing policy. It finds that the framing of Indigenous health in public media as a crisis and underlying public risk has had direct impacts on the development of policy, with outcomes characterized by regular sharp shifts in policy direction. The paper concludes that the practices of journalism permeate all aspects of policy development, and that while political actors use media content as an indicant of public opinion, there are also more direct relationships between policymakers and news media, whereby each party ‘talks’ to the other through the use of common frames and media strategies.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 3 MCCONNELL, Allan University of Sydney HINDMOOR, Andrew University of Queensland [email protected]; [email protected] Hindsight vs. Foresight: Competing explanations for political failures to anticipate the global financial crisis In the acute and particularly the aftermath stage of crisis, the most damning and penetrating question aimed at political leaders and senior state officials by the media, opposition parties, NGOs, think tanks, victims, and others, is: 'why didn't they see it coming?' The question is usually accompanied by an implication that there were clear warnings signs—metaphorical flashing lights and sirens—standing out from the 'normality' of political signals confronting policy makers Nowhere has the question and its assumptions been more prescient than in relation to the global financial crisis (GFC). This paper assess the plausibility of the 'why didn't they see it coming?' thesis in relation to the GFC. In doing so it draws on a range of policy, crisis and risk literature to engage in 'forward mapping'. Doing so leads to consideration of alternative explanations for elite (in)action. The latter includes the suggestion that political elites did not act upon signals because of a perception that the risks of failure were not sufficient to warrant policy change or a deep rethinking of core ideological frames.

Tuesday, 4pm, Secretariat MCDONALD, Bronwyn University of Newcastle [email protected] The Political Legacy of Iris Marion Young: Situating Responsibility and Justice Iris Marion Young’s book, Responsibility and Justice, posthumously published in 2011, presents a theory of responsibility aimed at addressing the unique moral and ethical challenges of the early 21st Century. Young argues for a need to understand responsibility in a way that supplements more traditional theories. Assigning blame for example, or what she calls the liability model of responsibility, is only one way to explain and right a wrong deed. The liability model of responsibility however does not always prove suitable for attending to matters of injustice, especially where there is no benefit to come from the act of assigning blame. Young argues this is especially so in cases of structural injustices. Young chooses the unique political philosophy underlying the anti‐sweatshop movement as the major case study to explain her theory of Political Responsibility and the underlying Social Connection Model that informs it. This paper offers a preliminary analysis of Young’s Social Connection Model and her approach


to conceptualising responsibility in what she says is a ‘forward thinking’ manner. It will be argued that Young’s approach offers a unique way to think about the nature of injustice. However, the uniqueness of her approach is not limited to its critical analysis of social wrongs and arguments about the best philosophical way to understand them. Rather, it extends to the capacity of her approach to inspire meaningful political action. Indeed, it will be argued that this is precisely what constitutes Young’s political legacy.

Wednesday, 11am, Private Dining Room 2 MCFARLANE, Bruce Monash University [email protected] The Internet, Child Sex Offenders and Violent Radicalisation: Identity, commonalities and the way forward: The lessons that can be learnt in combating online violent radicalisation Initial reactions to the title heading may lead the reader to ask the question: What do online child sex offenders and online violent radicalisation have in common? It may come as a surprise to some, but there are many. And it has nothing to do with the online content these two crime themes consume. Online child sex offenders and online violent radical development share many common traits that have not gone unnoticed in academic and law enforcement circles. In identifying these commonalities and crossovers, we can best utilise the lessons previously learnt in one crime theme, to combat the other. Common traits within these two online crime themes to be explored include: Identified stages of offending; Outcomes of offending; Offender stereotypes; and Use of online communications to facilitate offending Surprisingly, limited detailed research, if any, has been conducted in this area. This paper will attempt to make a start by ascertaining the role of identity, shared commonalities and will also argue that online child exploitation outcomes currently employed by stakeholders should be considered and utilised in combating online violent radicalisation.


MCLAREN, Kirsty The Australian National University [email protected] Continuity and Change: Protest event analysis of the Australian women’s movement, 1970–2005 This paper outlines initial findings from a protest event database created as part of the Mapping the Australian Women’s Movement project. Extending from 1970 until 2005, the dataset is a unique contribution to Australian political history. Here, insights into continuity and change across three areas—levels of protest activity, women’s movement claims, and patterns of media coverage—are presented. The protest event analysis shows ‘visible’ actions by Australian women’s movement waxing and then waning twice over the surveyed period. This paper considers how these changing levels of disruptive and performative collective action correlate with political opportunities and institutionalisation of the women’s movement. Because the database includes detailed quantitative and qualitative information, it maps the changes in issues raised at women’s movement events. This allows a nuanced analysis of claims‐making, and reveals significant shifts in the women’s movement identities and discourses. The database includes mainstream and alternative sources, and a significant amount of information about source coverage. Consequently, it allows scope for analysis of media coverage, and reflection on the method of protest event analysis itself. This data charts


interesting changes in newspaper articles, including the timing and scope of coverage and the gender of journalists covering women’s movement events. The paper concludes by suggesting that these factors may be evidence of changing perceptions of the women’s movement, and may be useful indications of some of the shortcomings of news archives as sources for political research.

Monday, 2.30pm, Members Dining Room 1 MCLOUGHLIN, Kcasey University of Melbourne [email protected] Of Merit and (Wo)Men: The politics of gender and judicial appointments To date four women and forty‐four men have been appointed to the Australian High Court. The retirement of a High Court judge generates conjecture about the replacement, particularly in recent times with women being appointed to the bench. Curiously, whenever a woman is elevated to Australia’s highest court, there is considerable emphasis placed on their meritorious virtues. This is in contrast to the appointment of eminent men, whose achievements are acknowledged but usually without an appeal to the terminology of merit. This paper critically interrogates the concept of merit in the context of appointments to the High Court. The concept of merit is inherently gendered in ways that act to exclude rather than include women. This paper explores the definitional and conceptual limitations of the concept of merit. It is argued that the gendered and disparate deployment of merit as a criterion and explanatory adjective in the public and political discourse surrounding the judicial appointments of women has in effect served to further reinforce women’s status as ‘other’ insofar as judicial authority is concerned. It is argued therefore that merit remains a nebulous and politicised concept which is in need of more coherent definition before it can be of any use as a criterion in which the executive government can invoke in making and explaining these important appointments. Indeed, the important role of the High Court as the court invested with the judicial power of the Commonwealth and by extension, its status as the third arm of government means that there are important political imperatives at play not only in the appointment process but also with regard to the public perception of the judiciary. It is argued that a re‐evaluation and reformation of the concept of merit in the politics of gender and judicial appointment is necessary to bring transparency to the process of judicial appointments. Further, this is necessary to avoid the potential erosion of judicial authority as that power gradually shifts from a homogenous to an arguably more heterogenous group of individuals.

Monday, 2.30pm, Members Dining Room 1

MCMILLAN, Kate Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] Free movement of persons and regional integration: the case of the Trans Tasman

Travel Arrangement

The Trans Tasman Travel Arrangement (TTTA), by which citizens of Australia and New Zealand are free to live and work indefinitely in either country, is invariably described by both governments as ‘underpinning’ their relationship and as ‘central’ to their efforts to facilitate integration between their two countries. This professed centrality of the TTTA confounds an assumption common to the international literature about regional economic integration; that


the freedom of movement of persons is possibly the least important of the four freedoms (people, goods, capital, services) and certainly the hardest to institute. So, does the TTTA experience demonstrate, as government rhetoric claims, that freedom of movement for persons not only facilitates the integration project between New Zealand and Australia, but is central to that project? And, if so, is this an experience that is unique to Australia and New Zealand, or is there a wider lesson to be learned from the TTTA experience about freedom of movement of persons as a facilitator of regional integration? Alternatively, have the claims about the importance of the TTTA to integration processes between New Zealand and Australia been overstated by both governments, and if so, why?


MEGER, Sara University of Melbourne [email protected] The Role of Patriarchy and the Political Economy in Wartime Sexual Violence: The case of the Democratic Republic of Congo Rape and other forms of sexual violence have been a prominent feature in the conflict in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, committed as a weapon of war and opportunistically by all groups involved. This article seeks to understand the causes of sexual violence in this conflict with a primary focus on structural influences. Through an analysis of literature on rape in war and primary data obtained through interviews conducted in eastern Congo in 2010, this article takes both masculinity and the economic objectives of armed groups to be important factors for understanding the use of sexual violence in the conflict in eastern Congo. This article takes the two international structures of patriarchy and international political economy to be pertinent subjects for the study of sexual violence in war. Recent trends in intra‐state wars have shown capitalist pursuits within the international political economy to be at the root of many contemporary conflicts, and an analysis of this structure can help us to understand the source of political violence in the conflict in eastern Congo. This article argues that while political and economic reforms are essential to ending the conflict, they may be insufficient for ending the use of sexual violence. In order that women’s rights are protected in post‐conflict Congo, social reform that addresses the relationship of sexual violence with unequal gender relations and hegemonic masculinity must also be implemented.

Wednesday, 9am, Members Dining Room 1 MICKLER, David and MCMILLAN, Nesam University of Melbourne [email protected]; [email protected] Locating 'Regime Change' in R2P and the ICC Debates over international intervention in Libya in early 2011 and the UN Security Council’s subsequent authorisation of limited external military action there reveal that the notion and potential practice of ‘regime change’ sit uncomfortably with the emerging normative acceptance and practical operationalisation of the ‘reaction’ phase of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) doctrine. Indeed, killing or forcefully removing Col. Gaddafi from power has been explicitly rejected as an objective of the operation by the intervening states, conscious of the political and military costs incurred in the earlier violent ending of the Ba’athist regime and Saddam himself in Iraq, as well as by influential R2P advocates, concerned about undermining the emerging yet fragile international consensus on military intervention for human protection purposes. The question of regime change has also arisen in the context of the Security


Council’s recent practice of referring ongoing and unresolved situations in non‐ICC states parties for investigation by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). In Libya and Sudan, respectively, this has led to the investigation and indictment of a sitting Head of State for atrocity crimes. A sign of the increasing use of international law as a tool for responding to violent internal political conflicts, this trend raises the important question of whether the forceful removal of culpable regime elites is in fact a precondition of achieving sustainable peace, security, and justice in such contexts. Further, in the Sudanese case, at least, the continuing incapacity of the ICC to execute President Bashir’s arrest warrant illustrates the difficulties of actually removing a sitting leader absent coercive military intervention. Exploring these developments in international norms, law, and political practice, and drawing upon disciplinary International Relations and Global Criminology, this paper seeks to locate and critically evaluate the rather ambiguously placed notion and practice of externally‐executed ‘regime change’ as a potentially logical and necessary—but also highly controversial and politicised—objective and outcome of the pursuit of justice, security and peace in the face of mass atrocities.


MICKLER, David and PHILLIPS, Melissa University of Melbourne [email protected]; VMR‐[email protected] ‘New Engagement’ or ‘New Scramble’? Evaluating Australia's 'New Engagement' with Africa The Rudd/Gillard Labor governments have since coming to power in 2007 actively pursued ‘new engagement’ with Africa, including an increased regional aid allocation, enhanced diplomatic representation and political exchanges, and the establishment of a parliamentary inquiry to identify Australian interests and objectives and to inform the developing relationship. Africa has hitherto featured only incidentally in Australian foreign policy and political consciousness, where national interests have traditionally been perceived to lie primarily in security and cultural relationships with the UK and US and in economic enmeshment with East Asia. Yet, as it increasingly ‘looks West’ in its international relations, Australia sees in Africa significant economic and political opportunities amidst continuing challenges of poverty, underdevelopment, and insecurity, as well as a site of emerging strategic competition between major powers, including China. For Australia, still a relatively minor player in the region, significant mining interests and the pursuit of African votes for Canberra’s UN Security Council seat bid operate alongside a tradition of activist middle power diplomacy in resolving international challenges, good international citizenship, as well as comparative advantages in certain technologies and forms of expertise that could be used to support sustainable African development and local capacity‐building. Against these contexts, this paper identifies the main features and challenges of Australia’s ‘new engagement’ with Africa and evaluates their significance for Australian foreign policy and national interests. It then moves to evaluate how particular Australian engagements with the region might alternatively advance and undermine the interests of Africans.


MIKLER, John University of Sydney [email protected] The Illusion of Market Power There has been debate about the desirability of markets since the industrial revolution. In more recent times, especially since the rise of what has been seen by many as neoliberal


globalisation, this debate has been held in the shadow of pronouncements about their inevitability. There is an extensive literature that considers whether globalisation means that markets are now ‘in charge’ rather than states, what the role of the state should and can be, and in this context the salience of alternatives to what was thought, before the global financial crisis, as the inevitability of the neoliberal state. However, the intention in this paper is to make what should be a straightforward, yet is bound to be controversial, point. This is that markets do not exist. They are an abstraction intended to conceptualise the way scarce resources are exchanged and allocated, but this abstraction hinders our understanding of the actors that are among the most powerful on the planet: corporations. With the demise of the prevalence of small, competitive, entrepreneurial firms and the rise of multinational corporations that dominate their industrial sectors, a focus on markets has long been out of date. Corporations are best studied as political actors with economic motivations, with the relationship between them and the governments of nations complex and institutionally constructed. Rather than the employing the concept of the market, an actor‐centred framework incorporating corporations and the governments of nations where they are headquartered is shown to be a more accurate way to study the political realities.


MILLER, Michael The Australian National University [email protected] Democracy by Example? Economic growth, policy diffusion, and regime change Does a positive association between democracy and economic growth across the world encourage the spread of democracy? Although this intuitive relationship is supported by theories of international policy diffusion and the democratic case study literature, there exists no cross‐country empirical research on the question. I argue that democratic economic success signals two important pieces of information: the economic advantage of democratic institutions and the economic rewards given to democracies by international actors. Looking at 166 countries from 1822–2004, this paper demonstrates that the world‐level correlation between democracy and economic growth predicts the spread of democracy, with an effect size larger than that of domestic growth. In contrast, no effect is found for democratic performance at the region or country level. Simultaneously, a country's level of democracy is stabilized by domestic growth and increased by a higher percentage of democracies in its region. The results provide new insight into the various foreign influences driving democratization trends.

Monday, 11.30am, Secretariat MILLER, Michael The Australian National University [email protected] Elections, Information, and Policy Responsiveness in Hybrid Regimes Despite widespread scholarly interest in hybrid regimes, the influence of autocratic elections on policy choice has been neglected. This paper argues that semi‐competitive elections allow citizens to credibly signal dissatisfaction through their vote share for the ruling party. To balance the interests of citizens and their elite coalitions, ruling parties adjust policy and patronage based on this election information. After illustrating this logic with a formal model, I present the first cross‐country analysis of policy‐setting within hybrid regimes. Looking at 277 autocratic elections in 91 countries from 1975–2004, I find that negative electoral shocks to


the ruling party lead to higher education and social welfare spending and lower military spending following elections. In contrast, there is no policy effect leading up to elections. Further, I find that oil wealth reduces policy responsiveness by making patronage cheaper, illustrating a potential mechanism for the resource curse.

Tuesday, 10am, Secretariat

MOFFITT, Benjamin University of Sydney [email protected] Rethinking Populism: Populism as a Political Style Recent events such as the rise of the Tea Party, the unexpected return of Pauline Hanson and the continued success of Hugo Chávez has meant that populism has enjoyed a resurgence in the fields of political theory and comparative politics over the past decade, moving from a topic of near obscurity to become one of political studies’ most contentious issues. Yet the very idea of populism remains hazy, with dominant conceptualisations of populism—as ideology, logic, discourse or strategy—often attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole, and failing to capture the specificity of the phenomenon. As such, this paper argues against dominant conceptions, and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a more sound way of thinking about the populism. It argues that this new category presents a way out of interminable debates around phenomenon, offering a conceptualisation that is amenable to both theoretical development and empirical analysis. To do so, it firstly considers the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches to populism, before developing the concept of ‘political style’ by drawing on recent developments in political sociology and theories of representation. In the process, it explores the central role of performance within political styles, asks what it actually means to speak on behalf of ‘the people’, and explores the aesthetic and relational elements of populism. It further argues that such a concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, as well as how it translates into the political mainstream.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 3 MOJ, Muhammad Tariq University of Western Australia [email protected] Deobandi Madaris: The Counterculture Context Deobandi Madaris (plural of Arabic madrassah = place of learning) make up more than 70 per cent of the total madaris in Pakistan. Deoband Madrassah Movement (DMM) was launched in 1866. Its origin can be traced to Shah Waliullah’s 18th century Islamic revivalist movement. DMM focused on reviving the original classic Islam as it was idealized in texts or the historical past. It opposed the folk Islam that had evolved in the subcontinent. One of the main objectives of the DMM was to protect and preserve Indian Muslim’s religious capital, which was considered to be facing threats not only from colonial rulers but also from within the community. The latter threat included the customs and practices of folk Islam, which were considered by DMM as theological corruptions and ritual degradations. Therefore, antagonism to the cultural practices and rituals of Indian Muslims has been the hallmark of the DMM throughout its 150‐year history. In that sense, DMM has acted as a countercultural group that has regularly come in conflict with the norms and values of the mainstream Muslim society. The patterns of countercultural tendencies in DMM have been changing over the years. This movement has been a mixture of the three varieties of counterculture defined by Milton Yinger: Ascetic; Activist; and Mystic. Originally, DMM acted as an ascetic counterculture that withdrew into a madrassah community to live and preserve their values in the backdrop of


eclipse of Shah Waliullah’s movement and end of Muslim rule in India. Later, DMM turned into an activist counterculture, which actively preached against several mainstream norms and practices. The third variety of mystic counterculture has somewhat shown by the Tablighi Jamaat (Proselytizing Group) of Deobandis, which instead of directly assailing the mainstream society, promotes individual enlightenment. Apart from looking for the presence of these three varieties of counterculture, this paper identifies the existence of a fourth variety of counterculture in the DMM in Pakistan. That variety can be called extremist or terrorist counterculture, which tries to marginalize and even annihilate its opponents physically as shown by recent trend of killing the visitors of shrines.

Wednesday, 9am, Members Dining Room 2 MOORE, Tod University of Newcastle [email protected] Wretched States—Thinking about Australian unity since the 1890s This paper is concerned with a certain misconception about the unification movement, which is typified in the statement by Gregory Craven that it was merely a ‘dream’ restricted to ‘the 1930s, 1940s and (to a lesser extent) the 1970s’. The sources demonstrate, contra Brian Galligan, that these arguments are not odd or out of place, but comprise a surprisingly old and well‐grounded tradition within Australian political thought. We may conclude that federalism is hard to change and we may agree that as Preston King argues it is not entirely inconsistent with sovereignty, but we need not accept Daniel Elazar's hypothesis that federal countries can never become unitary.


MORGENBESSER, Lee Griffith University [email protected] Legitimacy, Neopatrimonialism and Management: A typology on authoritarian elections In contemporary democracies, elections include citizens in the selection of leaders and policies and ensure they have more than one individual or organised group to choose from. This is consistent with elections traditionally being a method for selecting political authority. By contrast, in nondemocratic regimes elections exist but they do not facilitate the selection of leaders and policies because citizens either lack a choice or their vote is meaningless. Thus, political authority rarely changes in spite of elections. This paper addresses this issue by providing a typology of authoritarian elections. It argues that such regimes hold elections for three reasons: legitimation, neopatrimonialism, and elite management. In an effort to improve this nascent field of research, this paper concludes by outlining a number of inconsistencies that have emerged and residual questions that have been overlooked within the existing scholarship. It ends by suggesting a future research agenda.

Tuesday, 10am, Secretariat MORROW, Ross University of Melbourne [email protected] The Killing of Osama Bin Laden and the Contradictions in US Policy, Practice and Accounts of the Event On 1 May 2011, the White House announced Osama Bin Laden had been killed after a firefight at his compound in Pakistan and reports the next day said he had used a woman as a human


shield. Within days the official version of events had unravelled and new versions contradicted older ones. It now emerged that Bin Laden was unarmed and had been shot dead in front of his family. US President Barack Obama announced that ‘Justice has been done’ and that the man responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the United States was dead. This paper analyses and seeks to explain the contradictions in official accounts of his death, and in the wider social, historical and political context of this event: blame for 9/11 in the absence of evidence, US requirements that the Afghanistan government turn Bin Laden over while denying it the opportunity to do so, ‘respect’ for international law alongside illegal war and extra‐judicial killing, and support for terrorism alongside a war on terrorism.


MURPHY, Hannah University of Tasmania [email protected] The Global Governance of Core Labour Standards: Policy transfer and regime complexity Over the past decade, the World Bank has moved closer to accepting and implementing the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) notion of core labour standards. The case is of interest for at least two reasons: first, the Bank’s acceptance marks a distinct change to its previous emphasis on the need for labour market flexibility, with little or no concern for labour standards. Second, the case provides an example of policy transfer between inter‐governmental organisations (IGOs), an area that has not yet been subject to detailed study by scholars. The paper will examine the roles of non‐state actors—in this case, international trade unions—as well as the support of leading member states and the impact of the global financial crisis in broadening the commitment of the Bank to the ILO’s core labour standards. The preliminary analysis presented here opens up several avenues for further research in regards to the dynamics of international policy transfer and the barriers to implementation within complex IGOs.


NASSOR, Aley University of Newcastle [email protected] The Democratic Transition in Tanzania: Parliamentary authority and executive power in the House of Representatives of Zanzibar This paper forms part of a doctoral thesis examining the extent to which the political accountability of the executive has changed following the introduction of multi‐party politics in Zanzibar, a semi‐autonomous state of Tanzania. The reinstatement in Tanzania of a multi‐party political system in 1992 had some far‐reaching changes for both the Constitution of Zanzibar and its parliamentary procedures. But despite these changes the House of Representatives in Zanzibar is still constrained in its ability to hold the executive accountable. Within the Zanzibar political system the office of the President remains extremely powerful. This paper explores how the members of the House of Representatives and the executive perceive the factors affecting the accountability of the executive to the parliament. It is argued that despite the possibilities inherent in the implementation of a multi‐party political system the issue of the parliamentary accountability of the executive remains constrained by a number of factors. In reviewing the perceptions of various political actors in the Zanzibar some of these constraints are identified and discussed.

Tuesday, 10am, Secretariat


NETHERY, Amy Deakin University [email protected] Immigration Detention, Punishment, and the Australian Constitution Under Australia’s Constitution, the executive is able to detain non‐citizens for administrative purposes. The constitution places one limitation on this form of detention: it must not be punitive. Many former detainees argue that their experience of detention was in fact punitive. To date, however, High Court challenges to the constitutional validity of immigration detention on these grounds have not been successful, and the idea that immigration detention is not punitive has become a legal fiction at the foundation of bipartisan detention policies. Given this legal fiction, how should we as political scientists respond to the subjective experiences of immigration detainees? Using criminological theories of punishment, this paper develops a way of understanding immigration detention outside of the legal framework. The paper argues that rather than rejecting experiences as irrelevant, as the High Court has done, the experiences of immigration detainees point to executive power unrestrained by the constitutional limitation, raising enormous questions about the health of Australian democracy.


NEWTON‐FARRELLY, Jennifer Parliament of South Australia [email protected] Using Uncertainty to Ensure Democracy: Drawing a responsive electoral system with competitive seats US redistricting has changed its focus from remedying partisan bias to increasing responsiveness, partly because measurement of bias is inherently difficult and partly because entrenched incumbents have reduced voters’ ability to hold their government to account. An increasing number of states now require their redistribution commissions to draw competitive seats where they can. Australia’s electoral boundaries are drawn by independent commissions in a process which prevents the commissions from considering the political effect of the lines they draw, except in South Australia where the commission is required to consider precisely those effects in order to remedy partisan bias. That process now seems likely to fail whenever it is most needed because it is too hard to predict how marginal seats will swing with any given statewide swing. Perhaps what the commission could do is address bias in the safe seats and draw a few more marginal seats, using uncertainty to ensure that voters can hold their government to account.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 5 OJHA, Suman University of Queensland MISHRA, Sanjay Queensland University of Technology [email protected]; [email protected] Parliamentary Committees in Queensland During 1996–2001: How effective in scrutinising the executive? The term ‘committee’ is generally used in the Westminster parliamentary system to describe a body that is smaller than the whole of the Chamber. An effective committee system enables a legislature to review the policies of the executive more thoroughly and expertly than would be


possible at the plenary level. This study is an analysis of the effectiveness of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and the Public Works Committee (PWC) in the Queensland Parliament during 1996–2001 (The Borbidge period and the first Beattie period). The effectiveness of the committees has been analysed by examining the committee reports and the ministerial responses during the under the period of study. The findings of the study indicate that the committee structure was dominated by the executive as the majority of the members and Chairmen were from the ruling party. During this period the committees probed only minor technical, financial and administrative issues that did not have the potential to embarrass the government of the day. This structural weakness was the biggest limitation in making the committees an effective parliamentary device. However, within this constraint these committees were found to be partially effective. With regard to the effectiveness of the Public Accounts Committee, the study shows that 81% of the recommendations were fully accepted, 13 % were partly accepted and 4% were not accepted by the executive during the study period. Similarly, with regard to the Public Works Committee, the majority of Committee recommendations were incorporated by the government; or there was an assurance that the recommendations would be considered by the respective departments. However, committees pre‐selected only non‐controversial cases to investigate and made recommendations that were not challenging or encroaching on the executive power. The ministerial responses to committee reports indicate that those recommendations which sought to increase the accountability of the minister to the Parliament were not accepted. Thus, within the constraints and limitations that parliamentary committees generally have in the Westminster system of governance, the committee system in Queensland was found to be partly effective during the study period.


O’KEEFE, Michael La Trobe University M.O'[email protected] Australian Sanctions Against Fiji: Reappraising the calculus of success Much of the commentary on Australian and New Zealand sanctions against Fiji have focussed on their failure to persuade the Bainimarama regime to return to democracy. Observers also point to the ‘fact’ that China is displacing Australia and New Zealand from Fiji. The logical extension of these observations is that sanctions should be dropped. It is certainly true that sanctions have been ineffective in relation to restoring democracy, but this perspective, and those associated with it, may reflect a narrow view of Australia’s declaratory objectives and a narrow focus on one diplomatic outcome. Successes for Australia and New Zealand that are obscured by this narrative include the rebuilding of their close partnership and shared leadership in the South Pacific. If the calculus was altered to incorporate broader diplomatic and geopolitical considerations then our appraisals of the situation may be quite different.


ORIANA, Lucia University of Sydney SCOTT, Shirley University of New South Wales [email protected]; [email protected]; International Law in Public Diplomacy The rhetoric of international law plays an important role in public diplomacy. Most fundamentally it is used to help establish the legitimacy and reasonableness of the policies and


actions of the government in question. This paper will explore the role of international law in public diplomacy, drawing on examples of the public diplomacy of countries including Australia, the United States and China. This paper is proposed as part of a panel on public and citizen diplomacy convened by the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a non‐profit organisation established in 1933 to promote public understanding and interest in international affairs.


O’SULLIVAN, Dominic Charles Sturt University [email protected] Indigeneity and the Politics of Ethnicity The historic deprivation of indigenous sovereignty contextualises and distinguishes indigeneity from the general political rights of ethnic minorities in Australia and New Zealand. Indigenous claims ought not take priority or be used to set aside the rights of others, but their uniqueness means that indigenous peoples seek specific rather than proportionate political authority. Egalitarian principles of justice are therefore ill‐equipped to give full consideration to indigenous claims on the state. The problematic conflation of indigeneity with the rights of minorities is further illustrated by drawing comparisons with contemporary Fiji where majority status has not provided the indigenous population with substantive political authority. The reasons are multi‐faceted and there are significant contextual differences between Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, but the comparison does suggest that ethnic minority status alone cannot explain the relative political positioning of Australia and New Zealand’s indigenous peoples.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 3 OWEN, Stephen University of Newcastle [email protected] Researching Subjectification and Surveillance in Social Network Sites Social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook have come to be embraced by hundreds of millions of people across the globe. Current research into SNSs focuses on either the supposed psychological motivations and benefits of SNS use, or are ethnographically based user‐centric accounts of (predominantly) young people and their engagement with SNSs. This paper examines the methodological adequacy of these approaches. It is argued that despite producing valuable conceptual tools and a number of useful insights into the architecture, usage, and social impact of SNSs, these approaches skate over issues of power and politics. In many respects SNSs like Facebook offer users a seemingly unlimited freedom of expression with multiple opportunities to project various and different identities. Yet this freedom is enmeshed in a web of power relations along a number of axes. One axis is the power of users to produce and control their online identities while managing the fit between their online and offline selves. A second axis of power involves the digital architecture of the site that enables and constrains online choices. A third axis is the power to appropriate the selves, subjectivities, and data of users in ways unintended by the authors of that data. Considered in the context of those power relations a site like Facebook is a technology of the self par excellence. Hence, the paper draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman to develop a more adequate methodological approach that combines the key aspects of performance, subjectivity, and power.



OYARZUN SERRANO, Lorena Universidad de Chile [email protected] Opportunities and Challenges for Chilean International Insertion: Is it possible to transcend the commercial dimension? Since the recovery of Democracy in Chile, economic policy has become one of the fundamental aspects of their relationship with the world. Currently, it has 21 agreements in force with 58 countries, which generate 88% of global GDP. However, there are some criticisms to a model that privileges trade relations over politics and neglecting deeper relationship with the neighborhood. Recognizing that domestic‐international and cyclical‐structural factors affect a country's foreign policy, in this paper I will analyze the opportunities for Chilean international insertion in the actual global setting. The erosion of the influence of the Unites States in South America has provide some opportunities and challenges for participation in regional projects like UNASUR and to deepen links with other regions and countries such as China, Australia and the EU.


OZGUC, Umut University of New South Wales [email protected] The Material‐Semiotic Turn in Critical Security Studies: Performativity, materiality and the Wall in the West Bank Since September 11, 2001, the construction of walls and fences has become a concrete strategy in homeland security and the war on terror. The recent increase in wall building raises important questions about the ways in which securitization studies theorize security. While the performative understanding of ‘speech’ in securitization theory disrupts the ontological giveness of security, it fails to overcome the binary distinctions between discursive and material. This paper argues that it is necessary to develop a new understanding of securitization that transcends such ontological binaries. We need to incorporate the relationship between the material, the social and the political into our analysis. This would enable us to explore the multiplication of possibilities, practices, institutions and strategies that inform ‘corporeality of security’. In other words, critical security and border studies should take ‘matter’ much more seriously. By taking the wall in the West Bank as an example, this paper aims to contribute to the recent and very limited interest in material‐semiotics in security studies. The material‐semiotic turn in geography, sociology and science and technology studies provides us with an important analytical tool to understand how security works as a network of heterogeneous elements of the social and the political. Inspired from ontological position of material semiotics towards ‘non‐human agents’, this paper argues that the West Bank Wall is not a passive actor waiting to be ‘read’ as text on the landscape; rather it is an active agent having its own spatiality and temporality. The Wall as a hybrid and complex apparatus of security is an ontologizing and performative agent that produces contradictory borders, bodies, space and time. It transcends the boundaries between exceptionality and banality of securitization, pre‐modern and modern, repression and resistance, restriction and a passage, and utopia and dystopia. In doing so, it fragments the given dichotomy between the self and the other, here and there, and the social and the material. By focusing on the material‐semiotics and its implications in the context of West Bank wall, this paper explores the alternative ways of theorizing securitization, which also opens up new ways of thinking about resistance and politics.



PANCANINGTYAS, Heni The Australian National University [email protected] The Gender Quota Movement in Indonesia The women’s movement in Indonesia has promoted the advancement of women in decision‐making bodies since the 1930s. More recently, Indonesia has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1984. The treaty body that oversees CEDAW has recommended governments adopt gender quotas to address the underrepresentation of women in decision‐making bodies. In 1998, the women’s movement actively campaigned for gender quotas in parliament to be adopted in national laws. Initially many stakeholders were resistant to this, including political parties. But after tireless promotion by women’s organisations, gender quotas became an acceptable discourse. The campaign for quotas also unified women’s movement actors from different organisational backgrounds and ideologies. Women in parliament and women’s organisations worked hand in hand to pressure and lobby the national parliament to adopt gender quotas. In 2003, the Parliament passed an election law that encouraged political parties to have at least 30 percent of women in their party lists. This was a political milestone for the women’s movement in Indonesia. The gender quotas campaign not only created strong networks within the Indonesian women’s movement but also in women’s networks at regional and international levels. Findings show that continuing support from international organisations has been significant in developing the capacity of this network and contributing to the success of the campaign. This paper analyses the development of the gender quotas campaign, stakeholders involved, strategies and achievements to date.

Wednesday, 11am, Members Dining Room 1 PEMBERTON, Jo‐anne University of New South Wales [email protected] Bodies on the Line: Justice, Equality and Conscription Kant did not approve of standing armies: they fuelled threat perceptions and sowed the seeds for future wars. Kant preferred that the state’s military capacity be limited to a citizens’ militia that would be used only for defensive purposes. Yet there is another reason Kant rejected standing armies, which goes to his well‐known maxim that we must always treat people as ends and never merely as means. Putting people in harm’s way through deploying them in military conflicts was for Kant an extreme example of people being used merely as means. He noted that rulers in his own day were ever ready to command others to ‘immolate’ themselves in causes that did not concern them. Some liberal‐democratic peace advocates might argue that liberal democracies, due to their pacific nature and accountability mechanisms, generally are able to avoid such scandals. Yet we know that this is not the case as liberal‐democratic states have shown themselves more than willing to expose their soldiery to physical and moral hazards on reckless and ill‐considered grounds. That such military enterprises may be undertaken without majority community support goes to the issue of the gap that exists between state and society even in democracies, albeit a gap that may denote a lack or attenuation of democracy. That aside, it may also be that such enterprises enjoy substantial community support (if only for a time), and this means that is not only the institution of the state that needs to be put in question. Soldiers are part of that limited segment of society obliged to put their bodies on the line by virtue of their oath of office. While the principle of equality of citizenship would seem to imply equality of sacrifice in defence of the state, there


are practical and humanitarian reasons for our military contests to be undertaken by professional armies. If we accept this reality, then we might say in the spirit of Kant that the community bears an enormous burden of responsibility whether via the mechanism of the state or the mechanism of the street in order to ensure that fellow citizens whose special role it is to defend the innocent are not thrust into conflicts when there are no innocents to defend but many innocents to harm. Yet we might want to go further than this. At the heart of the liberal‐democratic peace thesis, is a stern appreciation that those who command war must be the ones who bear the burden of its cost. This is the fundamental basis of Kant’s idea of a citizen’s militia, an idea that concerns justice in two distinct but inter‐connected respects. The first relates to the principles of equal citizenship and equality before the law and what these principles radically entail. The second relates to the intuition that while it is one thing for me to put my life on the line, it is quite another to demand that others do so on my behalf. On these grounds one might begin to build a contemporary case for conscription that joins equality to justice.

Wednesday, 9am, Private Dining Room 2 PERCHE, Diana University of Sydney [email protected] No Trespassing: Crisis and continuity in policy making around the permit system under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act In the context of the current debate around Aboriginal land, property rights and economic development in the Northern Territory, the issue of who may access Aboriginal land remains a contentious one. The permit system, which was established as a product of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, has been vigorously criticised, and equally vigorously defended over many years. The role of the Aboriginal land councils and traditional owners in restricting access to Aboriginal land has come under fire from a variety of non‐Indigenous groups, including mining companies, tourism operators, and the media, as well as the Northern Territory Government. The issue rose to prominence on the Indigenous affairs policy agenda of the Howard Government in 2006, but measures to roll back the permit system were ultimately included as part of the Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2007. This paper examines the debate over this period in terms of the different frames, which have been applied to the restrictions on access to Aboriginal land—ranging from ensuring privacy and security in the context of private property ownership, through to fostering havens for criminal behaviour such as grog running, domestic violence, and abuse of children. The paper looks at the Howard Government’s use of the frame of ‘crisis’ to limit consultation and force reform, and compares this with the Rudd Government’s attempt to reinstate the permit system, demonstrating the strength of path dependency in this contested policy area.

Tuesday, 10am, House of Representatives, Room 5 POOLE, Avery University of Melbourne [email protected] The State and the Secretariat: Capacity and the norm of equality in ASEAN Like other regional organisations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) needs contributions from its member states to operate its Secretariat. However, unlike other regional organisations, ASEAN member states make equal contributions, and these are kept low


enough for the less‐developed states to manage. The rationale for this is ostensibly that the maintenance of equal contributions underpins the norm of equal status of members—part of the ‘ASEAN Way’. However, as a result, the ASEAN Secretariat has been constrained by a lack of resources. The ASEAN Charter (which came into force in 2008) purports to ‘empower’ the Secretariat and Secretary‐General, through measures such as appointing four Deputy Secretaries‐General and providing the Secretariat with the ‘necessary financial resources to perform its functions effectively’. However, the latter provision has been cast in doubt given that there were no changes made in the Charter to the formula for member state contributions. This paper explores the motivations of ASEAN members in engaging in the rhetoric of greater centralisation of the organisation, but failing to fulfil this apparent objective by increasing its resources. I argue that this is, in part, due to the tensions between capacity and the norm of equality. However, a more fundamental dynamic is at play: it appears that some members do not want an Association with increased capacity. As a traditionally intergovernmental organisation that emphasises sovereignty and non‐interference, and does not aspire to supranationalism, some member state representatives prefer to limit the capacity of ASEAN. From this perspective, the locus of decision‐making in ASEAN will remain with the member states, and ASEAN initiatives will continue to be conceived within the national secretariats based in each member state’s foreign ministry. However, this is an understudied area; the implications of this ‘capacity’ issue would benefit from comparative regional analysis. Do regional organisations require large central bureaucracies to be effective, credible and/or relevant? By briefly considering member contributions in the EU and the OAS, the paper will point to an agenda for future research on this question.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 1 PRINGLE, Helen University of New South Wales [email protected] Is Compulsory Voting an Illusion? Many academic and popular writers have argued that ‘compulsory voting’ is an illusion in Australia in the sense that it is not compulsory to actually fill out the ballot paper. I argue that this view is mistaken, and that the duty to vote clearly includes the marking of the paper. Whether and how the requirement is able to be enforced is a completely different question from whether it is indeed a requirement.

Monday, 2.30pm, Secretariat PRINGLE, Helen University of New South Wales [email protected] Blaspheming in the Suburbs: The Offence of Blasphemy in a Free Speech Regime In this paper, I consider the offence of blasphemy in the Australian political and legal context, and argue that provisions against blasphemy are not necessarily at odds with a regime of freedom of speech. The central examples used in the paper concern offensive behaviour prosecutions in suburban Queensland, and I place them in a comparative context of safeguards for human rights, including the consideration under the European Convention on Human Rights of blasphemy cases.



PRUITT, Lesley Victoria University [email protected] Making Space, Creating Common Ground? The literature makes clear that the way we understand and explain ourselves and others is inextricably tied to the material spaces we inhabit. Spaces are also impacted by the identities that exist and the dialogues that take place within them. Here I consider how particular kinds of spaces for music‐based peacebuilding can make participation in dialogue and identity work more accessible to young people. This paper engages with space in its various forms—material, conceptual, and relational—to consider issues related to peacebuilding with young people through music. Given its strong relationship with both space and identity, music can have a useful role to play in peacebuilding, as it may alter spaces in such a way that makes possible the contestation of identities that support conflict. For this research I performed a review of the existing literature and conducted fieldwork with two non‐government organizations—in Australia and in Northern Ireland—involved in youth peacebuilding projects that utilize music. The methods employed included participant observation and interviews with both the young people and the leaders involved in the programs. In both groups I found that music can be a particularly useful way to engage youth in peacebuilding. Most of the young people I interviewed would not have been interested in a peacebuilding program that was not music focused. However, many of those same youth, after being drawn in by the musical aspect were inspired to continue working to build peace in some capacity. In this paper I focus on how music could contribute to peacebuilding through presenting an opportunity for (re)creating spaces as more open and inclusive.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 3 RABET, Delphine University of Sydney [email protected] New Forms of Environmental Governance: Foreign firms and the state The ecological crisis that both the industrialized and less industrialized world is facing sees different nation‐states taking different paths to address it. If most research seems interested in environmental policies developed by wealthy countries, this paper focuses on the situation in countries where institutions are relatively weak and enforcement of any existing regulations often problematic. This leaves the state in need of finding innovative solutions to tackle environmental issues. Because of international pressure or for domestic reasons, many countries in the majority world are in the process of establishing and strengthening their environmental regulatory framework. However, they also experience institutional difficulties and resources limitations. At the same time, foreign capital continues to invest exponentially in these same countries mostly through the operations of Multinational Corporations (MNCs). This paper argues that such large economic entities, domiciled in the Triadic regions, are political actors in environmental governance. They influence policies at the global level but also at national levels within each of the countries where their global operations are located. In the past twenty years, MNCs’ self‐regulatory endeavours, and in particular their involvement in the development of voluntary environmental codes of conduct and regulations, have been recognised and encouraged by a range of other actors from Non‐Governmental Organizations to states themselves. The non‐binding character of such commitments reveals the limits of MNC’s efforts and cases of failure to abide by these codes abound, still, the participation of corporate actors in policy‐making processes has been welcomed in the context


of countries from the majority world in a variety of ways. This paper illustrates and discusses the mechanisms through which foreign MNCs become key players in the design and implementation of environmental regulations sponsored by the state and the results of such an involvement in terms of environmental justice. It does so through outlining the power‐based theoretical framework within which such a development has to be located and provides empirical evidence of this phenomenon through an analysis of the interactions between foreign corporate actors and the state in Mexico.


RANKIN, Ben Swinburne University [email protected] Alfred Deakin and the Politics of Australian Water Resources This paper considers Alfred Deakin’s prominent role in the initial development of Victorian water law and policy and how his expertise later influenced the federal water debate. Deakin is best known for his role in establishing many core federal institutions during the first decade of the Commonwealth. These can be credited to the developmental social liberal agenda he actively pursued throughout his political career. His formative years in Victorian colonial politics provide an insight into how he first employed this political philosophy in a practical situation. Deakin occupied the forefront of a fundamental debate about Victorian agricultural development and firmly established the foundations of that State’s water legislation. As Minister for Water Supply, Deakin had utilised a policy of state action in rural areas to encourage specific economic and social outcomes. Deakin’s legislative measures were the decisive factor underlying the extensive agricultural development that later occurred across the Murray‐Darling Basin. His published works on irrigation are further illustrative of how his overseas tours were determinative in shaping his politics. This paper intends to argue that Deakin’s knowledge of the technical, legal and political aspects of Australian water resources was without equal. As the separate colonies moved towards federation and control over water resources became a principal issue of division; Deakin’s advanced understanding of Australian waterways and their significance to agricultural development was influential in developing a federal resolution to the problem. In the Federal Parliament, Deakin educated his contemporaries on the importance of the Murray‐Darling to the future of the Commonwealth and this was reflected through later inter‐jurisdictional water resources initiatives.


REILLY, Alexander University of Adelaide [email protected] Executive Accountability for Immigration Detention Under the policy of mandatory detention for persons arriving in Australia without a visa, detention only ends when a subsequent event occurs—the granting of a visa, removal or deportation. The lack of a time limit on detention means that effective administrative oversight of the detention regime is extremely important to minimise the potential harm of detention on those detained under the policy. The paper reflects on the adequacy of administrative oversight of mandatory detention in Australia.



REGENT, Nikola The Australian National University [email protected] Virtue in Classical and Contemporary Republicanism The paper discusses the importance of virtue in republican thought. Montesquieu famously declared that virtue is the principle of republican government, capturing in nuce this central value of classical republican thought. Yet, contemporary republicanism pays hardly any attention to virtue—its absence is particularly pronounced in the work of the most prominent contemporary republican theorist, Phillip Pettit. Examining a number of significant passages in the writings of chosen classical republican writers, this paper shows the importance of virtue for republican thinking, and tries to establish why virtue is, nonetheless, of so little relevance for contemporary republicans. Implications for contemporary republicanism are outlined: by disregarding virtue, republicanism becomes yet another strand in liberal thought.

Monday, 11.30pm, Private Dining Room 2 ROBERTS, Cain University of Sydney [email protected] Domesticated Foreign Policy? Prime ministers, domestic actors and a public policy approach to foreign policy analysis The barriers that separate foreign and domestic policy are being diluted; decreasing national sovereignty, increasingly permeable borders and an ever widening breadth of formerly domestically bound policy contexts impacting on foreign policy making, are all blurring the distinction between domestic and foreign policy realms and the political actors they involve. In other words, the policy domain in which foreign policy makers are required to work is more complex than ever before and has given rise to the importance of intermestic issues in foreign policy decision making. This complexity has lead to uncertainty in how foreign policy is conceptualised, what the major issues requiring action now constitute, who the most important actors within foreign policy are and what institutional arrangements will now more appropriately structure how foreign policy is made in Australia. In order to understand the impact this complexity and uncertainty has had on the way Australia makes and executes foreign policy and the quality of the outcomes of these decisions, we need to understand the processes, structures, actors and influences that are pivotal in setting Australia’s international agenda. In contending with these areas, we also need to acknowledge that Australian foreign policy making is dominated by the axiom that there is no more powerful actor in the process—irrespective of the complexity—than the incumbent prime minister. Accordingly, this paper concerns itself with the concentration of foreign policy making power within the role of the prime minister at a time when the policy context in which Australia’s foreign policy must be made is growing in complexity. It seeks to understand that at a time when actors across many policy spectrums are required to develop the best foreign policy outcomes for Australia, does concentrating policy making power in the office of the prime minister impede access to these domestic based actors and discourage their engagement? Further, this paper will argue that the complexity associated with contemporary foreign policy making and the ensuing uncertainty implores us to explore new ways of conceptualising how Australia develops its international agenda. It will propose the use of theoretical approaches more at home with the policy sciences to begin to untangle the role played by key actors and institutions within foreign policy making—the most notable actors from the perspective of this research being the prime minister and domestic actors. It will cover the early stages of a PhD project into this


research area, examining these theories, the historic role of the prime minister in foreign policy making, key domestic actors attempting to influence foreign policy and discuss some early findings from the case studies under investigation.

Monday, 11.30am, House of Representatives Room 2 ROBINSON, Geoffrey Deakin University [email protected] Labor’s Century in New South Wales For decades the New South Wales Labor Party has been seen by observers as a model of pragmatic and electorally successful labourism. The recent crisis within the NSW Labor government that ended in the landslide electoral defeat of March 2011 has called this depiction into doubt. Was the 2011 electoral debacle a once in a century aberration or did it demonstrate an exhaustion of the NSW formula? This paper examines NSW Labor’s electoral history from 1910 to 2011 by the use of ecological regression and the method of bounds with particular attention to the electoral debacles of 1932, 1988 and 2011. Was Labor’s electoral hegemony in NSW the result of skillful governance or was it largely a reflection of the electoral weight of Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong? Did the 2011 election result indicate a fundamental shattering of Labor’s base or can the party recover as quickly as it did after 1988?

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 5 RODAN, Garry and HUGHES, Caroline Murdoch University [email protected]; [email protected] Ideological Coalitions and the International Promotion of Social Accountability: The Philippines and Cambodia compared International aid agencies are increasingly placing social accountability at the heart of their governance reform programs, involving a range of social activist mechanisms through which officials are rendered answerable to the public. Crucially, aid agencies are not just promoting these mechanisms in emerging democracies, but now also in authoritarian societies. What then are the likely political regime effects of these mechanisms? We approach this by examining who supports social accountability, why, and the implications for political authority. Focusing on the Philippines and Cambodia cases, it is argued that, to differing degrees, social accountability mechanisms have been subordinated to liberal and/or moral ideologies favouring existing power hierarchies. These ideologies often privilege non‐confrontational state‐society partnerships, drawing activists into technical and administrative processes limiting reform possibilities by marginalizing, or substituting for, independent political action pivotal to the democratic political authority of citizens.

Tuesday, 4pm, Private Dining Room 1 ROGERS, Brooke University of Queensland [email protected] My Place or Ours? Renegotiating the meaning of place This paper explores the relationship between place, narrative and reconciliation. It examines the way in which dominant versions of history and ontological security concerns contribute to


the marginalisation and disenfranchisement of other place narratives. Places are comprised of diverse social spaces, which encompass differing densities of human experience, attachment and involvement. Places are invested with contradictory meanings and complex power‐relationships, they are therefore inherently political, subject to conflict and, frequently, the source of marginalisation and division. Reconciling the narrative of place involves overcoming divergent narratives and their associated Self/ Other place dynamics. This requires that parties reconsider their respective place narrative and re‐write a narrative that introduces a new social reality. In particular, re‐working the master narrative requires finding meaning outside the dominant narrative by encouraging the expression of a counter‐place‐narrative. Overcoming narrative animosity involves finding new avenues for dialogue. This paper draws on the notion of ‘narrative space’ as an epistemic framework through which the voice of the Other may be heard. Narrative space can serve to soften difference by providing an opening for the expression of divergent narratives of lived‐experience which challenge the master narrative. This paper reflects on how the master narrative of place can be renegotiated to include the narrative of the Other. This paper contends that place itself, whilst often a source for conflict, may in fact provide a space‐opening in which counter‐narratives may be expressed. It examines the example of Berlin and the Berlin Wall where the Cold War master narrative of place was renegotiated to include the Other. This case study demonstrates that whilst place was central to the formation of a master narrative of division, it was also fundamental to the impetus for narrative change.

Tuesday, 2pm, House of Representatives Room 3 RUBENSTEIN, Kim The Australian National University [email protected] Australian Intergovernmental Relations: A gender and change perspective This paper looks specifically at the intergovernmental relations aspect of Australian federalism to ask: to what extent and in what ways have intergovernmental arrangements accommodated or obstructed the advancement of gender equality policy? The paper first looks at intergovernmental relations from a gendered perspective including an analysis of the key players and issues that have dominated the agenda. It then traces the development of gender equality policy through COAG in two areas—violence against women and childcare—to assess relationship between gender equality advocates, both within and outside the bureaucracy, and intergovernmental processes on policy outcomes. The paper draws attention to the fundamental importance of a gender perspective for understanding the operation of Australian intergovernmental relations and the processes of change within them. It also highlights the opportunities and constraints facing advocates who seek to use these processes to advance gender equality policies.

Tuesday, 4pm, Members Dining Room 1 RUN, Peter University of Queensland [email protected] From Crisis to Democracy? A systemic assessment of South Sudan’s founding constitution After 55 years of conflict between Sudan’s northern Muslims and southern Christians/traditionalists, the Government of Sudan (GoS) and southern liberationists, the Sudan People Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) reached a military stalemate which, along with international pressure, made possible, the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) negotiated in Naivasha, Kenya, in 2005. One of the hallmarks of the CPA was


the self‐determination clause, which granted the people of South Sudan the right to choose between secession and unity. On January 9, 2011, almost 99% of registered voters chose to establish the newest state—the Republic of South Sudan. Soon after the referendum results, the president of South Sudan, Mr. Salva Kiir formed a committee to review the interim constitution, which according to the CPA is operational only between January 9, 2005 and July 9, 2011. The committee has so far released a draft and a public consultation process is underway before the matter is tabled in South Sudan Legislative Assembly in May. After necessary amendments, the constitution took effect upon independence on July 9, 2011. The constitution stipulates some democratic principles that may prove trying to existing political ideologies and civic culture. This paper examines these principles in the context of the country’s troubled history and its web of diversity by using emergence theory as a means of understanding the chaotic state in which this new nation‐state is being formed.

Monday, 11.30am, House of Representatives Room 1 RYAN, Kerry Swinburne University [email protected] The Australian Citizenship Test: The ins and outs and who belongs? This paper discusses the long history of the use of language tests as a means of enforcing government policy in Australia. It will focus primarily on the latest example of such policy‐making with the introduction in October of 2007 of the Australian citizenship test, a test, in English, of the knowledge of the traditions, history and values of Australian society. Prospective citizens are required to pass the test as one of the conditions required in order to gain Australian citizenship. The paper will chart the implementation and administration of the Australian citizenship test as well as detail the review of the test commissioned by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in 2008. It is contended that the review process failed to address some of the chief concerns raised by academics, refugee advocate groups and organisations, among others, and really only served to further legitimise the test in the eyes of the voting Australian public.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 5 SALIK, Naaem University of Western Australia [email protected] India‐Pakistan Nuclear Competition: Implications for regional stability On 19th April 2011 Pakistan conducted the maiden test of its newly developed short range ballistic missile Hatf‐IX (NASR). The missile has a range of 60 kilometres and can be fired from a multi‐tube launcher mounted on a mobile carrier. The Pakistan Government identifies it as ‘a quick reaction weapon capable of carrying nuclear warheads of appropriate yields’ and that ‘this test has consolidated Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence at all levels of threat spectrum clearly indicating the possible battle field use of this new weapon system’. The test has generated a vigorous media debate as to the rationale behind this development. Analysts supportive of this development argue that it is Pakistan’s response to India’s provocative and threatening ‘Cold Start War Doctrine’ which India has been war gaming since 2004. Others view this as a destabilizing development, which would make nuclear war more probable in South Asia. Meanwhile, India’s Army and Air Chiefs have claimed that they are capable of launching operations similar to the one by the US in Abbottabad tht killed Osama bin Laden. Pakistan has


in turn promised ‘a befitting response to any Indian action inside Pakistan’ and that ’[Pakistan has] not only selected targets in India but [has] plans rehearsed already’. This has prompted the convening of India’s Nuclear Command Authority chaired by the Indian Prime Minister and attended by the services chiefs and the National Security Advisor to review the state of readiness of India’s nuclear arsenal and delivery systems. Against the backdrop of continuing tensions in an unstable security environment in the region, this paper analyses the recent nuclear developments in South Asia and the directions in which the two countries are moving in terms of technological and doctrinal developments. It explores the likely impact of Pakistan’s fielding of a missile system with obvious battlefield utility on the prevailing security environment, and the motivations behind the test including the relevance of India’s repeated threats of reprisal attacks and surgical strikes against Pakistan. The paper also assesses the implications of Indian ventures of 5000 kilometres range ICBM Surya and the nuclear powered submarine Arihant for South Asia and the security of the Asia‐Pacific region on the one side and Middle East and Africa on the other.

Wednesday, 9am, Members Dining Room 2 SANCHEZ URRIBARRI, Raul La Trobe University [email protected] Contention Through Litigation in Latin America: Foundations for a comparative analysis Why do social movements choose to employ litigation instead of other available options? What are the absolute, and conditional, effects of the different factors that account for the decision to go to court, and subsequent success? This research seeks to shed light on these questions, by providing a comparative, systematical discussion of the specific circumstances under which social movements or their members choose to use the judicial route to influence policy‐making and defy an adverse policy status‐quo (ie judicial mobilization). As key variables of judicial mobilization, I focus on: 1) Characteristics pertaining to the origin, organization and other relevant features of the social movements in question; 2) The political opportunity structure that surrounds the social movements’ decision to litigate or else (and the characteristics of such proceedings), including institutional factors, and the existence, or lack thereof, of a support structure for litigation; 3) The social movements’ commitment to a rhetoric of rights, as part of the way they frame their efforts, vis‐à‐vis their members, other potential allies, the government and the population as a whole; and 4) Other relevant factors. This work in progress focuses on Latin America, a region where countries have experienced different modalities and degrees of social movements’ litigation, especially at the High Court level, with different levels of success and influence. In this region, it is possible to hold a variety of factors that potentially account for variation constant across units and over time, thus allowing for a more accurate understanding of the relative effect of different variables of interest on the prospects and success of legal mobilization through courts.

Tuesday, 2pm, Secretariat

SANDERS, Will The Australian National University [email protected] Analysing Electoral Systems Through Five Simple Questions: A journey of discovery from Northern Territory local government to the world of electoral science This paper will recount a journey of discovery which began with the observation of local government elections in the Northern Territory in 2008. It will analyse the electoral system


used in those local government elections and how this led me to re‐examine the world of electoral science more generally. The argument of the paper is that current common categorizations of electoral systems in political science are insufficiently analytic and deductive. They do not allow us to fully understand how, and why, different electoral systems contribute to certain patterns in electoral outcomes. By asking five simple questions about electoral systems, this paper develops alternative groupings of electoral systems, which can be discussed more clearly and analytically. The five questions are: 1) What is the rule for winning? 2) How many representatives are to be elected? 3) How are votes marked, or organized? 4) How are votes counted? and 5) How many votes do electors have? The paper argues that existing inductive, historical discussions of electoral systems in political science tend to jumble answers to questions 1 and 4 and to neglect question 5. By answering questions 5 and 4 more clearly and distinctly from questions 1–3, a revised more enlightening analysis of electoral systems and their consequences will, hopefully, begin to emerge.

Monday, 2.30pm, Secretariat SCERRI, Andy RMIT University [email protected] After Dualism? While much of the literature discusses green citizenship as a normative instrument to further green political objectives, I explore how established conceptions of citizenship might obstruct or foster opportunities for the kinds of practices that greens advocate. First, the linking of green citizenship with the dissolution of Nature/Culture dualism and favouring of holism, breaking down the split between the private and public spheres and efforts to foster non‐contractualism and local‐global non‐territorialism are identified as key foci for debate. I propose the view that neoliberal reformism and consumer‐capitalism have done very well at implementing social relations based in holism (corporate social responsibility), depoliticized private choices (green consumerism), dissolving the social contract (replacing the welfare state social contract with the non‐contractual ‘new world of work’) and de‐territorialized local‐globalism (networked governance). That is, a highly unsatisfactory ‘greening’ of the state is taking place, one that reflects the partial success of critical social movements and broader cultural change in the very late 20th century. I argue for greater emphasis on conceiving of citizenship in terms of the forms that injustice takes in such ‘greening’ states. I argue that it is difficult to identify the perpetrators of injustice in post‐industrial conditions. Injustice in a holistic frame appears as a consequence of the organization of society as a whole. I examine how movements that are not necessarily green— such as advocates for a financial transactions taxation, fair trade and the environmental justice movement which is green but eschews much environmentalism— are challenging injustice in these holistic terms. By describing how these movements directly address the forms that injustice takes after dualism, I draw attention to the contemporary political culture surrounding citizenship amidst the ‘greening’ of the state. The paper develops the view that it is necessary to recognize a disjuncture between the holistic vision for sustainable development that greens everywhere by definition advocate, and the shortcomings of a political system that has, over recent decades, incorporated holism into its institutions, albeit on terms that are not of greens’ choosing.



SCHLOSBERG, David University of Sydney [email protected] Rethinking Ecological Justice: Capabilities and Critics This paper contributes to an ongoing conversation about the applicability of the capabilities approach to justice to the non‐human realm. The central argument is that capabilities offers a way to frame justice not only to individual human beings and their communities, but also to individual animals and ecological systems. In contrast to Holland’s insistence on the environment being a ‘meta‐capability’ for human justice, I argue for a justice to nature outside of the bounds of human needs. And in response to Cripps’ fears of the potential for irreconcilable conflicts between subjects of justice, I both refute the premise of some perceived conflicts and offer a deliberative approach to addressing others. The provision of capabilities for both human and non‐human alike is thus dependent on both recognition and procedural justice, and the paper provides a link between these various frameworks for justice as they are applied to human and non‐human alike.


SCHUPPERT, Fabian University of Zurich [email protected] Resource Rights: What and whose are they? In times of anthropogenic climate change and gross environmental degeneration, people seem to become increasingly aware of the perils of harmful resource use, unnecessary resource waste and the potential drying up of scarce resource pools. However, attempts to normatively regulate existing practices of resource extraction, use and consumption through distributing resource rights face the problem that it is rather unclear what resource rights actually are and to whom they belong. In other words, resource administration is extremely difficult to organize (justly and sustainably) as long as resource rights are sometimes treated as an aspect of territorial rights and other times as a form of private property rights. Thus, the aim of this paper is to offer a critical investigation of resource rights, arguing that we first have to be clear what we are talking about (ie which resources) and how right claims to these resources can be legitimate. The paper will start, in part one, by distinguishing between different aspects of resources, trying to get a better understanding of what the differences between different kinds of resources (eg mineral‐based and fugacious resources) are and how the concept of ecosystem services fits into those ideas. The second part of the paper will focus on the idea of rights, and how moral claims to certain resources and/or ecosystem services significantly differ from the idea of politico‐legal claims to resource ownership, extraction, and use. In the course of this analysis it will become clear that resource rights seem to cross established boundaries, and that we must carefully distinguish between rights to ecosystem services and rights to resources, such as oil, or gold. The third and final part of the paper will briefly address the question of who can legitimately hold resource rights, and how rights to resources and/or ecosystem services should be distributed. Overall, the paper will present an original account of resource rights, which not only offers a better understanding of how resource rights differ from other rights, but it also helps us in addressing issues connected to resource scarcity and environmental degeneration.



SCOTT, Andrew Deakin University [email protected] The Fragmentation of Political Parties on the Left and the Formation of New Alignments: Comparing Australia with ‘red‐green’ coalitions in northern Europe The formation of a minority Labor government in Australia following the 2010 national election with the crucial support of the Greens Party and breakaway members from a long‐standing agrarian party, brings into Australian politics a new left‐of centre governing coalition with some similarities to the ‘red‐green’ coalition government which governed Germany from 1998 to 2005. This paper compares the recent changes and realignments on the Left of centre of Australian politics with alliances between social democratic or labour, and environmentalist and other, parties in northern Europe including the ‘red‐green’ coalition currently governing Norway. The paper presents and analyses polling data which shows that the Labor government in Australia which was first elected in 2007 in its own right, has, since April 2010, almost always needed the Greens in order for the new left‐of‐centre de facto coalition to exceed the official, long‐standing Coalition of parties on the Right of centre of Australian politics in numbers of primary votes. The decision by two crucial rural and regional independent MPs, both civic leaders, in September 2010 to support the formation and continuation of a minority Labor government confirms the extent to which the National (formerly the Country Party) has lost the role which it once had as the voice of rural and regional Australia due to its becoming too subservient to the urban, market liberal orientation of its senior Coalition partner, the Liberal Party, on issues such as telecommunications (including broadband). The paper argues that Labor, the Greens and the two agrarian independent MPs in the new de facto coalition have considerable common policy ground including for investment in large renewable‐energy projects in rural Australia, and in tackling socio‐economic disadvantage through education initiatives, which will help to hold them together despite their differences on other policy questions.

Monday, 11.30am, Secretariat SELCHOW, Sabine London School of Economics [email protected] The ‘Global’‐isation of Contemporary Politics: Approaching an important symbolic dimension of contemporary politics Recent years have seen a significant proliferation of the adjective 'global' in public, political and academic discourses worldwide. What is almost as intriguing as the striking popularity of this adjective is the fact that the phenomenon of its striking ‘omnipresence’ has not yet attracted systematic attention from social and political scientists. There is, of course, a comprehensive scholarly debate about the supposed ‘global condition’ of our times, just as there is a comprehensive debate about the notion of ‘globalisation’, with which the attribute ‘global’ and its use are commonly associated. Yet, the phenomenon of the sheer omnipresence of the adjective ‘global’ has not yet been addressed by political analysts. This is surprising because, as my paper illustrates, the omnipresence of the adjective ‘global’ in discourses worldwide is more than a linguistic curiosity; it constitutes a distinct phenomenon (the ‘global’‐isation of politics), the analysis of which enables us to understand an intriguing and highly politically charged symbolic dimension of contemporary politics. This is because the omnipresence of the adjective ‘global’ can be taken and analysed as a multidimensional play with and discursive negotiation of the notion of the ‘new world’. Consequently, the study of the omnipresence of the adjective ‘global’ enables political analysts, first, to systematically


unveil culture‐specific and socially ratified notions of ‘the new’, and, second, to detect and study (speech) acts through which issues, such as poverty, health etc, are lifted into the discursive realm of the ‘new’. As my paper explicates, a critical engagement with both of these aspects is highly valuable because the notion of ‘the new’ is a particularly charged and powerful one. The particularly charged nature of the notion of ‘the new’ is due to two interlinked aspects. First, the notion that there is something ‘new’ about our world is a statement about the state of affairs, about how things ‘are’; as such, its proclamation evokes the illusion of objectivity and naturalness. Second, the proclamation that there is something ‘new’ about a particular phenomenon is commonly associated with notions of the unknown, the uncertain and the unprecedented. Notably, the modern subtext that is implied in the notion of the unknown and uncertain has meant that it is widely associated with a negative value, namely with the ideas of ‘risks’, ‘threats’, ‘dangers’ and ‘loss of control’, which, in turn, are powerful factors in the context of policy making. The aim of my paper is to conceptualise the omnipresence of the adjective ‘global’ as a distinct phenomenon and to illustrate the value of its study. Hence, my paper is mainly a theoretical one, however, my conceptual points are substantiated through concrete empirical findings from my systematic analyses of the ‚global’‐isation of contemporary US, German and Australian politics.


SIMPSON, Adam University of South Australia [email protected] Climate Change, Energy, Justice and Security in Myanmar (Burma) As a country sandwiched between Asia’s two populous and emerging economic giants, Myanmar (Burma) has played host to an increasing number of transnational energy projects, particularly natural gas pipelines and large hydroelectric dams. From an international justice perspective Myanmar, as a UN‐designated Least Developed Country, deserves the opportunity to alleviate poverty for its people by fully developing its energy resources. In addition, compared with oil and coal many of the projects currently being undertaken in Myanmar are relatively climate friendly. Nevertheless, as a country characterised by ongoing civil conflict and national elections in 2010 of dubious democratic value almost all the electricity resulting from these projects will be exported to neighbouring countries with the resulting foreign exchange used by the ruling military regime either for the purchase of military hardware or siphoned off for personal enrichment. Building on fieldwork undertaken in Myanmar since the elections this paper therefore compares the international and local implications of these projects and finds that despite relatively serendipitous climate advantages the exploitation of these energy resources tends to exacerbate environmental injustice and insecurity for many local ethnic minority communities. It argues a more balanced approach to energy and environmental justice is required that accommodates the aspirations of poverty stricken communities without endangering the human rights and environmental security of others.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 2 SMITH, Katherine The Australian National University [email protected] Gendering Neutrality: A feminist investigation of International Humanitarian Assistance and its gender framework In recent years, discussions of gender equality have become integral to humanitarian discourse. Heavily influenced by established thought in ‘gender and development’ studies,


gender is now included as a priority cross‐cutting issue in the policy and practice of most major (western) international humanitarian assistance (IHA) providers. The concentration of women and children in displaced populations and a growing belief amongst donors and the international humanitarian community that women are among the most vulnerable groups during times of emergency has effected an ‘international consensus on the need to consider gender issues in emergencies and humanitarian assistance.’ This paper will investigate this ‘international consensus’ and problematise the suggestion that gender issues have recently and helpfully been introduced to IHA. It will do so by illustrating that IHA has always been a gendered practice and argue that the current push for gender awareness builds upon pre‐existing gendered hierarchies and constructions within its policy and practice—a policy and practice which, historically, has been discursively represented as being both impartial and neutral, including gender‐neutral, despite evidence to the contrary. Further, it will suggest that moves to prioritise gender do not fundamentally challenge IHA’s extant gendered construction. Thus, these moves will remain insufficient to remake the existing humanitarian frameworks that have allowed gendered injustices to take place. The paper will make these arguments by investigating, first, how gendered constructions worked in IHA before gender was an explicit priority area in IHA, and second, how gender has worked similarly during the contemporary era of gender mainstreaming. Finally, the paper will look to a possible post‐gender era for IHA, suggesting that a move away from the gender concept may hold the most potential for security for all gendered identities.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 2 SPACKMAN, Gavin University of Canberra [email protected] Deep Green: An ecological critique of the industrial paradigm The foundations of the Western worldview have been fundamentally shaped by the enduring influence of the 18th century Enlightenment. However, the knowledge, values and understandings embodied by the Enlightenment are becoming increasingly inadequate in dealing with the problems they have helped create. The ‘super‐ideology’ of Industrialism—embodied today by the hegemonic fusion of liberal political ideology, the capitalist economic system and representative democratic government—underlies many of the issues currently threatening ecological integrity, sustained economic stability and human well‐being. As sweeping social problems, enduring economic instability and accelerating ecological degradation coalesce, an emerging catastrophe inexorably unfolds. Humanity appears to be entering a period of unprecedented crisis. However, crisis precipitates change. The emergence of ‘deep’ ecological political philosophy presents a compelling challenge to many of the fundamental concepts underpinning the dominant worldview. This paper uses the above assumptions to present a critical analysis of the manner in which deep ecological understandings have influenced political thought and to explore the relationship between scientific and political theory. The paper then presents a critical analysis of liberalism, capitalism and representative democracy through an ecological lens by exploring the alternative worldview put forward by deep ecological political theory. Furthermore, the paper will consider Heywood’s assertion in Political Ideologies that ‘[the ecological paradigm] does not merely demand the transformation of the economic system or the reordering of power relations within the political system; it seeks to establish nothing less than a new mode of being, a different way of experiencing existence’. Finally, the paper investigates the possibility of a paradigm shift towards an ecological worldview.



STANTON, Richard University of Sydney [email protected] Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage: Irony, melodrama and adversarial political discourse in the NSW state election campaign In the 2011 NSW election campaign competing political discourses played out between parties, candidates, the media and voters. Actors engaged in strategic activities that ranged across a number of orthodox theoretical positions including agenda setting, media effects and framing. More interestingly, actors participated in communicative political actions that have become normative but are yet to be explained adequately in theoretical terms. The strategic use of irony and melodrama as adversarial discourses are not new. What is relatively new is the overt nature of the communicative actions—the rejection of the Gricean notion of the cooperative principle, discourse maxims, quasi‐contractual obligations and implicature in political communication. The paper seeks to expand on Dahlgren’s notion that political engagement requires an affective driver and that the Habermasian notion of rationality in political discourse is no longer relevant—innovation requires new publics and the formulation of new strategies that legitimise and privilege discourses that include the rejection of communicative maxims in favour of irony, melodrama, metaphor, and adversarial attack. It attempts to bridge a number of theoretical positions and models including situational irony, flouting, political politeness, and the anarchy of events as news. It argues that asymmetrical relations of power provided the communicative spaces in which kindred spirits experienced communal achievement using the tactics of irony and melodrama. It uses as its study two binary actors that resonated with the media and voters—former federal MP Pauline Hanson and the mayor of Marrickville, Fiona Byrne. Ms Hanson and Ms Byrne surfaced as candidates with strategies that lay outside the normative frame of campaign discourse—Ms Hanson campaigned on her previous platform of equity for all Australians, while Ms Byrne campaigned on a platform rejecting Israel as a legitimate sovereign state. The paper does not set out to question the legitimacy of the individual tactics employed by either Ms Hanson or Ms Byrne. What is does set out to do is identify whether the tactics employed by them have become normative and if so, whether the media play a significant role in framing such events in either ironic or melodramatic cultural categories, or indeed whether the anarchy of events is beyond the capacity of the media, forcing them to adopt a frame of reference which is routinised and expected. The paper will use a content analysis methodology of selected media to support its hypothesis that alternative political discourses attract media and public attention by employing theoretical positions that may be considered inappropriate and even unethical as discursive strategies.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 4 STANTON, Richard University of Sydney [email protected] Campaigning as an Independent: The view from a participant observer In 2011 I campaigned as an independent for election to the Legislative Council in NSW. I did so as an academic keen to observe the processes of campaigning from the perspective of a participant rather than as a theoretical observer. I applied theoretical models to the campaign including a media relations model and a political communications model. I obtained approval from my university to campaign as a candidate and I self‐funded the campaign. I was unsuccessful in my bid for election. This paper provides an outline of the political and media


functions of the campaign, makes observations about the campaigning process and argues that the employment of valid models and theories is no match for the reality that is the electoral process.


STEFF, Reuben University of Otago [email protected] Global Missile Defence: Agent of disorder or new co‐operative mission? Changes in strategy can be difficult to initiate and implement, even after the recognition that fundamental change in the operational security environment has occurred. America’s prolonged efforts to deploy a global missile defence shield offers an instructive example. Conceived and vigorously debated throughout the Cold War, the concept of missile defence was extended and adapted in the post‐Cold War security environment to deal with the perceived threat of so called ‘rogue states’. Problematically, this reaction stemmed from a limited reading of the new operational security environment—one that continued to focus on state‐centric threats and military responses to them—rather than a comprehensive view of security that was required to address the newly‐emergent and multidimensional threats that arose due to globalisation. Consequently, the deployment of missile defence carried out by the Bush administration, and the export of related systems to its friends and allies, brought with it considerable strategic and political costs vis‐à‐vis other great powers who viewed the system within the Bush administration's grand strategy of primacy and designed primarily for offensive rather than defensive purposes. Notably, they specifically opposed the exclusionary nature of its deployment rather than missile defence systems in principal. This suggests that future co‐operation and joint deployment of missile defence systems could help resolve the current security dilemma that surrounds missile defence. In addressing this issue the paper suggests that the approach being embraced by the Obama administration is promising, and the scope of missile defence co‐operation must be extended further. It identifies the mutual benefits that would flow from this and outlines different proposals for an inclusive missile defence system. Ultimately, it argues that rather than being a focal point of antagonism, joint missile defence systems can act to foster a new era of strategic co‐operation amongst the great powers.


STEVENSON, Hayley and DRYZEK, John The Australian National University [email protected]; [email protected] Enhancing the Legitimacy of Multilateral Climate Governance: A deliberative democratic approach Debate following the announcement of a Copenhagen Accord for global action on climate change centred as much on the question of legitimacy as on the question of scientific integrity. Numerous state and non‐state actors vocally denounced the Accord as illegitimate because it was drafted in an exclusive and non‐representative group of specially selected states. A key question that emerged from the Copenhagen summit was how international decision‐making should be structured to produce outcomes that are widely considered legitimate? In this paper we introduce a model of global climate governance based on deliberation and discursive representation. In this model, legitimacy is associated with the formation and transformation


of preferences through authentic and inclusive dialogue that responds to the needs of all affected parties. In assessing the legitimacy of the Copenhagen Accord and the decision making procedures implemented in Copenhagen, it is thus important to consider the pre‐negotiating phase of the two‐year Bali Action Plan, which guided decision making from Bali to Copenhagen. The focus of our analysis in this paper is the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperation Action (AWG‐LCA), which met in five pre‐negotiation sessions to allow parties to engage in open and transparent debate with the aim of developing mutual understandings on elements of an anticipated Copenhagen agreement. This suggests some potential for legitimacy in the design of the multilateral process for defining a post‐2012 climate change agreement. To assess the deliberative quality of the pre‐negotiating phase of the AWG‐LCA, we carry out two analytical tasks in this paper. First, we employ Steiner et al’s Discourse Quality Index to assess the authenticity of deliberation. Second, through an analysis of discourses represented in deliberation we assess the inclusivity of deliberation. Drawing on the findings of these analyses, we outline a set of proposals for improving the legitimacy of multilateral climate governance.

Tuesday, 2pm, Members Dining Room 2 STONE, Diane University of Western Australia [email protected] Private Philanthropy and the Transnational Policies of the Open Society Foundations The Open Society Foundations (OSF) is a private operating and grant‐making foundation that serves as the hub of the Soros foundations network, a group of autonomous national foundations around the world. Founded in 1993 by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, this collection of national foundations and autonomous organizations operate in more than 60 countries. The Foundation network funds and operates a range of initiatives to promote open societies by shaping national and international policies with knowledge and expertise. The Foundation is a mechanism for the international diffusion of expertise and ‘best practices’ to post‐communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the former Soviet Union (FSU) as well as other democratizing nations. This paper concentrates on ‘soft’ ideational diffusion and normative policy transfer. Doing so undermines notions of clear‐cut boundaries between an independent philanthropic body in civil society and highlights the intermeshing and mutual engagement in governance that comes with the OSF’s coalitions, partnerships and common policy dialogues. Non‐state involvement, specifically transnational philanthropy, in certain fields of policy helps promote a dynamic for the ‘transnationalization of policy’, particularly as we witness the shift from government to governance. National and sub‐national venues of policy making are not displaced or disabled, but are inter‐connected in increasingly complex fashion. In particular, ‘soft’ forms of transfer—such as the spread of norms, knowledge and expertise in which non‐state actors play a more prominent role—complements the hard transfer of policy tools, laws and practices pursued by government agencies and international organizations.


STRAUSS, JONATHAN James Cook University [email protected] The Significance of the Organisational Origins of the Greens The Greens have grown in strength as an electoral force in the last decade. Some of the discussion about this has sought to comprehend the party and its support base as a ‘left bloc’


political formation. An understanding of the process of the formation of the party further illuminates this analysis. It also helps to explain the ‘dry years’ of the party in the 1990s. This paper will consider the history of the origins of the Greens and what that suggests about its course for success in winning broader support.


TAVAN, Gwenda La Trobe University [email protected] No Going Back? Australian Multiculturalism as a path dependent process Multiculturalism is back according to Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, who made a speech at the Sydney Institute on 16 February 2011 in which he outlined his government’s ‘new multiculturalism strategy’. The statement was warmly welcomed by many, but raises a number of questions. Is it a genuine attempt by Labor to reinvigorate multiculturalism? What factors will determine the success or otherwise of this attempt? Will the Australian people accept it? Such questions are even more pertinent in the context of recent announcements by European leaders that multiculturalism has failed. The issue of migrant integration clearly remains highly politicised in many liberal democracies, including Australia. This paper identifies the circumstances that have led to recent attempts to revive Australian multiculturalism and assesses the substance of this pledge in terms of the Gillard government’s doctrinal, practical and political objectives. A more fundamental concern is to evaluate the viability of multiculturalism in terms of its continuing relevance to 21st century Australia. Despite its controversial history, multiculturalism displays many of the characteristics of institutional ‘path dependency’. This enduring record presumably comforts supporters, suggesting the architects of multiculturalism got some things fundamentally right. It raises significant concerns, nevertheless, about political inertia in relation to the issues of migrant rights and equity.

Monday, 9.45am, House of Representatives Room 5 THURBON, Elizabeth University of Sydney [email protected] Same But Different: Reviving the developmental state model by revisiting its ideational foundations For scholars interested in the question of latecomer development, the 1980s and early 1990s produced a bounty of conceptual advances, perhaps the most famous of which was Chalmers Johnson’s ‘developmental state model’. Based on his analysis of Japan’s remarkable post‐war development, Johnson sought to draw some generalisable lessons for other latecomer nations by identifying the essential ideational and organisational foundations of rapid industrial transformation. However, just as the basic tenants of the developmental state model appeared to be gaining a mainstream audience, the 1997–98 financial crisis struck, prompting some scholars to declare the model redundant. Given the widely divergent performances of East Asia’s developmental states during the crisis, some scholars claimed that the model overemphasised cross‐national similarities and neglected important differences, negating its analytical utility. In this paper I challenge the claim that the developmental state model is redundant because it cannot account for important differences between the states to which it has been applied. To this end, I advance a new way of conceptualising the paradoxically ‘same but different’ developmental states of North East Asia: the concept of ‘legitimacy enhancing


growth’. I begin by revisiting the key features of Johnson’s developmental state model, particularly its often neglected ideational foundations, and explaining how the incorporation of the concept of legitimacy enhancing growth can improve our understanding of different forms of developmentalism as it emerged in North East Asia. I then turn to examine the utility of the concept of legitimacy enhancing growth by applying it to an analysis of both the similarities and differences between the industrialisation strategies of two developmental states—Korea and Taiwan—focusing in particular on their financial strategies. I conclude by discussing the implications of my extended developmental state framework for debates about the future of developmental states in an era of globalisation.

Tuesday, 10am, House of Representatives, Room 3 TRANTER, Bruce University of Tasmania [email protected] Party Leaders, Global Warming and Green Voting in Australia As the Australian environmental movement has routinised and become increasingly institutionalised, its representative aspect—the Australian Greens—has grown to become a successful minor party. Environmental attitudes and voting for the Greens in the Senate are examined here through multivariate analyses of Australian Election Study data collected between 1990 and 2010. Younger people, the tertiary educated and postmaterialists consistently vote for the Greens, yet major party leaders also appear to shape environmental voting. Controlling for social and political background, respondent evaluations of major party leaders are associated with attitudinal variation over the risks of global warming. Major party leaders not only seem to influence public opinion on global warming, but also have an impact upon Green voting in federal elections.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 4 VAS, Christopher The Australian National University [email protected] Public Engagement: A Model for Innovative Policy Collaboration Traditional forms of political participation in western democracies have declined in preference for newer forms of engagement. There has been a move away from the Big Ideas model—where government tell its citizens what is best for them, and Consumer Centric model—wherein government thinks it knows what is best for its citizens and endeavours to deliver this in exchange for electoral support, to a Public Engagement model—where governments genuinely collaborate with the community to design and deliver services that address the needs of its citizens. This paper reports on one such case study—Public Engagement (PE) in Canada's province of New Brunswick. The framework towards encouraging participation and collaboration will be discussed. The province of New Brunswick utilised the PE model to address the critical issue of poverty in its community by creating a poverty reduction strategy. The study is built on in‐depth interviews with individuals from New Brunswick including the Premier himself and will focus on the role played by ministers, change agents—internal and external to government, other experts and the engagement model used by the provincial government to directly engage with the community. The achievement of political bipartisanship will also be discussed.



VON THIEN, Liam New York University [email protected] Is There a Right to a Secure Cultural Community? This paper is part of a larger project that seeks to evaluate group‐based cultural rights by drawing upon both social scientific and social psychological research into the nature of ethnicity. Several political theorists, most prominently Will Kymlicka, have argued that if the liberal state is to foster and protect the value of personal autonomy, it must also foster and protect the cultural groups that provide the structure within which we make autonomous choices and life plans. Moreover, many contemporary liberal states are socially arranged such that some minority groups are vulnerable in comparison to the majority culture. Thus, special protections are required in the form of group‐based cultural rights that secure one’s cultural community. I argue that when we unpack the arguments in favor of cultural group rights they reduce to a claim that one’s identity as a member of a cultural group has a normative force distinct from one’s interest in the cultural goods that are produced within that group. However, the more we independently value the membership of a cultural community the more a kind of specious reasoning about social norms and values creeps in. They become valuable because they are the norms and values of the community to which I belong, not because they contribute to my individual happiness and flourishing. I suggest that the only feasible candidate for an identity that has an independent normative import is a descent‐based one, or in other words, an ethnic identity. However, an argument that we need to extend rights to certain ethnic groups in order to ensure that their members have a secure ethnic identity must contend with the socially constructed nature of ethnic identity. In particular, ethnic identities are predicated on a false psychological essentialism, which attributes a shared, deep underlying essence to members of a group, whose membership derives from possessing a relatively arbitrary, inherited attribute.

Wednesday, 9am, Private Dining Room 2 VON THIEN, Liam New York University [email protected] Liberal Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Constructivist Theories of Ethnicity This paper is part of a larger project that seeks to evaluate group‐based cultural rights by drawing upon both social scientific and social psychological research into the nature of ethnicity. One of the most pressing questions for the modern liberal state is whether it can be just to confer particular rights or status to members of certain groups that are not extended to non‐members. A second, related question is whether membership of an ethnic group can be grounds for a group‐rights claim. A highly influential answer to these questions is put forward by Will Kymlicka, who argues that a particular subset of ethnic groups, those with vulnerable cultural structures, require special rights and protections from the state in order to protect their societal culture from being overridden by that of the dominant groups within the state. Underlying Kymlicka’s theory is an understanding of ethnic identities as fixed and of common culture as a defining or characteristic element of ethnic identity. Similar characterizations of ethnicity and culture permeate the normative literature on group‐specific rights. I argue that the assumption of a fixed or highly constrained ethnic identity, leads normative theorists to attribute shared, fixed cultural structures to ethnic groups and to broadly view cultural production and reproduction as something that is exogenously determined by one’s


membership of an ethnic group. Cohesive culture and social norms practiced by members of an ethnic group are seen as something that naturally flows from fixed ethnic identity, rather than something that constrains the possibility of ethnic identity change by imposing higher costs on those who seek to change their identity. Group‐specific rights conferred on ethnic groups in order to protect their cultural integrity may, in fact, impose an institutional structure that significantly constrains the potential for ethnic identity change. These kinds of rights are both institutions of cognition, constructing and perpetuating the relevant framework through which individuals view ethnic identity within the society, and institutions that structure incentives, making individual entitlements dependent on aligning one’s ethnic identity with a right‐bearing identity that is available from ones set of ethnic attributes.

Tuesday, 4pm, House of Representatives Room 3 WALTER, James and STRANGIO, Paul Monash University ‘T HART, Paul Utrecht School of Governance [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Studying Prime Ministerial Leadership: Towards a new synthesis The study of leadership seems beset with centrifugal characteristics that result in its proponents talking past each other rather than engaging in productive collective conversation. Some of these have their origins in different theoretical tendencies. Others differ over whether the focus should be on ‘what executives actually do’ rather than on how it might be done better (accusing practitioners of the latter of imposing theoretical or normative prescriptions on real world politics). Discrete approaches (say, personality studies on the one hand, or historical institutionalism on the other) have insights to offer, but are pursued as incompatible paths—how might they be jointly utilised? When it comes to the study of prime ministers, apparently fruitful leads from disparate systems are adopted with an enthusiasm that pays insufficient attention to their limited purchase, leading to sterile debates (such as the ‘presidentialization’ thesis), when comparative study across both Westminster and non‐Westminster prime ministerial executives promises to be more valuable. This paper reviews key examples of such literatures, seeking ways to take advantage of their core insights into the study of prime ministerial leadership, while avoiding diffusion. The aim is to achieve a synthesis that enables us to capitalise on cognate elements of their approaches and hence promotes our common interest in better understanding prime ministerial leadership.

Monday, 9.45am, Private Dining Room 1 WANNA, John The Australian National University [email protected] Making Pigs Ears from Silk Purses—Devising and passing budgets when in minority government—The case of the first Gillard Budget of 2011–12 This paper analyses the difficulties of budget preparation and parliamentary authorisation when governments are in minority status. It explores processes and trade‐offs the Gillard government was forced to make in preparing its first budget (2011–12) as a minority government. This was Labor’s fourth budget in a row, drafted and presented at a time when the Australian economy was beginning to rebound from the global financial crisis—but with the significant cost of that crisis still evident in the fiscal position. The government’s main strategy seemed to be to increase employment and participation rates to reduce the welfare


‘drag’. There were also many demands for new spending that would become permanent or fixed over time (eg, mental health, regional assistance). The paper then traces the difficulties the Gillard government faced in negotiating this budget through the both the lower house—where the government relied upon the support of four very different cross‐benchers (each with divergent priorities) and the Senate—where until the end of June it needed the support of the opposition, or the greens plus two maverick independents, but after July had to deal with the Greens themselves holding the balance of power. The last budget to face such a torrid time going through the parliament was the infamous Dawkins budget of 1993–93, which stumbled because of Keating and Dawkins unpopular measures and unpreparedness to compromise with the Democrats. In this 1993 case the government was forced to negotiate almost line‐by‐line on amendments moved by the opposition and Democrats testing support for each item. How does 2011–12 compare?


WANNELL, Emma University of Canberra [email protected] The Australian Climate Debate: Positioning Australia within an international climate change context Climate change is a global problem that requires global solutions. Historically, the beliefs behind progress and prosperity have been based on the steam engine of Industrialism, a carbon‐intensive economic platform that promises to thrust forth any economy that follows its ideology. However, this is not only an unsustainable mechanism for growth, both for individual countries in the long‐term but also for an equal undertaking of unrestricted growth for all countries, but contrary to popular belief it is not the only option for economic prosperity and progress. The case of Australia highlights the difficulties that countries face when challenged with a decision that threatens the traditional understandings of growth and the core beliefs that surround the concept of the nation‐state. Global climate change poses just that challenge. This paper will firstly cover the historical movements of climate change within the Australian political agenda, highlighting the parallels that exist between the various positions of party leaders on climate change. Secondly, the political divide between the today’s parties will be examined in greater depth whilst considering the influences behind climate change denial, the role of conservatism, and the relationship between business, government and economic prosperity. Thirdly, the current processes employed for calculating national carbon emissions responsibility, lead by the Kyoto Protocol, will be critically analysed against Glen Peters’ et al theory which identifies the exportation of carbon emissions, facilitated by the international trade system, as a key error in the effort to assign national responsibility for carbon emissions. This theory destabilises the arguments put forward by proponents of inaction on climate change whilst also creating an even greater challenge for addressing climate change. Finally, the cases of Europe and China will be used to bring the situation in Australia into greater light by exposing it to the international climate change context which challenges the perspectives of a number of political figures within Australia who assert that the efforts of other nations have been minimal in an attempt to isolate Australia from the international climate change debate. Both the developed nations of Europe and the fastest developing nation, China, provide key examples of the potential for low‐carbon economic pathways that produce a viable alternative to traditional carbon‐intensive pathways. They also highlight the significant gamble that Australia is taking if it decides to continue with traditional methods of economic growth. By choosing to support its mining and export industries it risks falling behind an international trend towards investing in low‐carbon economic systems which have the potential to prompt a


paradigm shift away from industrial understandings of progress and prosperity, but one that also does not necessarily run counter to capitalist ideology.

Wednesday, 9am, House of Representatives Room 4 WARHURST, John The Australian National University [email protected] Australia's Atheist Prime Minister: Julia Gillard's unbelief in historical context Numerous Australian Prime Ministers have declared themselves to be agnostics but Julia Gillard appears to be the first declared atheist. Her declaration put her in stark contrast to the religious beliefs of her immediate predecessors Kevin Rudd and John Howard. This paper puts Gillard’s beliefs in context and discusses the Australian prime ministerial tradition in this regard with particular reference to her earlier agnostic predecessors, Billy Hughes, John Curtin, Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke. The paper also discusses several political implications of Gillard’s position. These include her presentation of herself, her relations with churches and church‐state issues generally, her support base, community attitudes towards gay marriage and euthanasia, and the possible electoral implications for the contest between the Labor Government and Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party. The paper is one part of a broader study of the religious beliefs of Australian Prime Ministers.

Monday, 2.30pm, Members Dining Room 2 WARREN, Aiden RMIT University [email protected] The Prague Vision: An assessment of Obama’s nuclear policy In a rousing speech delivered two years ago in Prague’s Hradčany Square, President Barack Obama conveyed his vision for strengthening the global endeavour to control the spread of nuclear weapons, making progress on disarmament measures and preventing nuclear terrorism. The Nobel Peace Prize winning President pledged that he would undertake ‘concrete steps’ that were necessary to reduce the number and salience of nuclear weapons. Despite such bold rhetorical notes and promises in relation to limiting the role of nuclear weapons, Obama has stopped short of changing the status quo on critical issues that have lingered since the Cold War. Having galvanised international hopes and expectations in which the United States would decisively move away from the Bush strategy to one of nuclear disarmament, the moderate NPR and New START Treaty, together with pragmatic developments at the Nuclear Security Summit, the 2010 NPT Review Conference and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty indicate that the role of nuclear weapons in American security policy has so far changed very little. This paper will assess the nuclear guidance documents and initiatives of the Obama Administration and will reveal that while incremental steps toward disarmament have taken place, they have been accompanied by measures to retain American primacy and nuclear options.



WEEKS, Liam Macquarie University [email protected] Challenging the Omnipresence of Parties. Is STV an independent‐friendly system? The Single Transferable Vote is thought of as an electoral system that favours independent candidates. Such a belief, however, is based primarily on the experience of Ireland, and fails to explain why so few, if any, independents are elected under STV in either Australia or Malta. This study re‐examines the nature of this causal link with an analysis of the electoral fortunes of independents in Australia and why STV does not yield them a fruitful return. This study finds that STV fails to help independents in Australia because it lacks the features conducive to the latter’s success in Ireland, in particular a candidate‐centred ballot and small constituencies. It is not necessarily the case that STV is not independent‐friendly, but electoral system detail can affect the ability of a system to realise expected consequences. This raises some questions about merits of relying on one case to develop theories and of the grouping of electoral systems for comparative purposes.


WILSON, Lou and KINNER, Fiona University of South Australia [email protected]; [email protected] Urban Densification Policy and the Health of the Child Australian urban policy has largely ignored or understated children’s issues. This matter is most noticeable in regard to urban densification policy, where there is considerable focus on creating greater dwelling density, public transit orientation and less personal space. To achieve densification, State governments have sought to assert greater control over local government authorities under the rubric of freeing the land market from the constraints of local political pressures, the so called NIMBY (not in my backyard) syndrome. Densification is associated with brownfields development but also with the reclamation of public green space for higher density housing. Urban densification policies are based on an assumption that densification will restrain development on the urban fringe and that the denser the city, the better for economic activity. These policies are allied to a ‘healthy cities’ argument that denser cities make for ‘walkable neighbourhoods’, which have health benefits for local residents. This argument has emerged at a time when there is evidence to support claims that children’s health in Australia is declining. There are studies that suggest that residents in ‘walkable communities’ have higher physical activity levels but limited evidence demonstrating causality. Moreover, there is no mention of these studies involving children. Indeed recent research to test whether green space and residential density were independently associated with weight gain in children found it was green space, not residential density that correlated with healthier body weight for children. Our paper reviews current urban policy in Australia on densification and green space in relation to the literature on children’s health. We argue that urban densification policies in Australia might be in tension with the health of our children and hence with a core component of social sustainability.



WILSON, Shaun Macquarie University [email protected] Working Class Liberals Across rich democracies, left‐of‐centre parties are apparently troubled by electoral defections to the right caused by a complex of issues involving immigration, national identity, and economic insecurity. This paper offers new evidence from the Australian Election Study (2004–2010) to help characterise working class voters who identify with and vote for the Liberal/National Parties. Once this electorate is identified, my paper compares working class Liberals with other voter blocs on the critical issues of economic redistribution and immigration. In the Australian case, it appears that weak support about redistribution among working class Liberals, and not uniquely hostile views towards immigration, explain their conservative orientations. Research into ‘working class conservatives’ is an old topic within political sociology that has stressed the authoritarian foundations of working class politics—an assumption that has been undermined by newer research. My argument emphasises (instead) the activist role of right‐of‐centre parties in ‘constructing’ their own working class electorates and considers in more detail the reasons for conservative parties continuing to target blue‐collar voters. I conclude with some preliminary arguments about the impact of class stratification and class issues in contemporary democracies on major party electoral strategies.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 5 ZAMMIT, Andrew Monash University [email protected] Explaining Australia‐Lebanon Jihadist Connections Like many societies, Australia faces the threat of political violence from a movement commonly termed jihadism, an extremist and highly politicised variant of the Islamic faith. Unique among Western countries, individuals involved in jihadism in Australia have predominantly been of Lebanese descent, and several Australians have been arrested in Lebanon for alleged jihadist activity. While the activities of at most a few dozen people do not reflect on the roughly 70,000 Lebanese‐descendent Muslims in Australia, they do highlight a phenomenon that has not been explored, or even noted as unusual, in current research on jihadist militancy. This paper examines potential explanations for this unique situation, focusing on factors such as long‐distance nationalism, economic disadvantage, marginalisation, network links between militant groups in Australia and Lebanon. This paper acts as a first step towards a comprehensive explanation, which encompasses causal factors for jihadist militancy in Australia in general combined with the particular circumstances of Lebanese‐descendant Muslim Australians.

Wednesday, 11am, House of Representatives Room 3 ZEB, Rizwan University of Western Australia [email protected] Traditional Power Structure and Ethno‐political Conflict in Baluchistan: Target killing of Punjabi settlers as a case study Pakistan is a frontline state in the on‐going global war against terror. The excessive focus on counter‐terrorism has limited the focus by analysts and policymakers on the on‐going insurgency in Baluchistan. The largest province of Pakistan with 5.1% population, Baluchistan


has been a site of insurgency at different stages in Pakistan’s history. In the current phase of insurgency, the Balochs who were first demanding autonomy are now demanding a separate state. The current insurgency, which started in 2003–04, is also more organized and well equipped than the earlier ones, and more violent. One of the unique features of this is the target killing of the Punjabi settlers by the Baluch militant nationalist groups who view Punjabi settlers as outsiders and supporters and agents of the state. Most of the explanations of insurgency in Baluchistan have focused on the political dimension: Selig Harrison in his book, In Afghanistan’s Shadow, focused on democracy but did not extend to taking into account the local traditions and understandings of ideas of democracy. The more recent available literature on Baluch insurgency by analysts like Rashid and Adeel provides the political reasons for the insurgency but does not explain why the insurgency is taking an ethnic shape or outlook. Drawing upon the literature on ethnic conflicts and target killing, this paper is based on the premise that ethnopolitical conflicts occur due to the politicization of ethnicity. In the process of politicization of ethnicity, the leadership of that ethnicity plays the most important role. Once ethnicity is politicized, it is the leadership that decides whether the politically active ethnicity will turn violent or not. When it turns violent, government symbols and installations are targeted, second, as are other ethnic groups. This is done for two reasons; one, to signal resolve, second, to achieve a stronger bargaining position vis‐a‐vis the central government. Applying it to the situation in Baluchistan, it will test the hypothesis that the target killings of the Punjabi settlers by Baluch insurgents is basically aimed at the state which, according to Baluch nationalist leadership, has been depriving Baluchistan of its due share and rights. In other words, the Punjabi settlers in Baluchistan are at a wrong place at a wrong time.


ZETLIN, Diane University of Queensland [email protected] The Languages of Culture and Human Rights The controversy over the wearing of the veil in many countries has raised theoretical concerns about how to recognise cultural rights within the context of the acceptance of international human rights. Seyla Benhabib advances a theory about the inclusion of cultural rights within a discourse ethics approach. This paper argues for an alternative approach that recognises different discursive principles for cultural and human rights. I argue that a human rights approach needs to recognise the right to culture, but this is different from a recognition of cultural rights.

Monday, 11.30am, Members Dining Room 1 ZHANG, Feng Murdoch University [email protected] The Rise of Chinese Exceptionalism in International Relations Although exceptionalism is an important dimension of China’s foreign policy, it has not been a subject of serious scholarly research. This article attempts to identify manifestations of exceptionalism in China’s long history and explain why and how different types of exceptionalism have arisen in different historical periods. The analytical approach is both historical and theoretical. It explores how international structure has interacted with


perceptions of history and culture to produce three distinctive yet related types of exceptionalism in imperial, Maoist, and contemporary China. While resting on an important factual basis, China’s exceptionalism is constructed by mixing facts with myths through selective use of the country’s vast historical and cultural experiences. The implications of contemporary China’s exceptionalism—as characterized by the claims of great power reformism, benevolent pacifism, and harmonious inclusions—are drawn out by a comparison with American exceptionalism. While American exceptionalism has both offensive and defensive faces, Chinese exceptionalism is in general more defensive and even vague. While not determinative, exceptionalism can suggest policy dispositions, and by being an essential part of China’s worldview, it can become an important source for policy ideas, offer the ingredients for the supposed construction of Chinese theories of international relations, and provide a lens through which to view emerging Chinese visions of international relations.


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